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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/shinu97 on 2024-09-30 22:30:31+00:00.

You know when you are at home after a long day at work and you are just bone-tired and ravenous for the bleak dinner you have been looking forward to all day? But, then you realize that you are cleared out of food? Nothing in the pantry, nothing in the fridge? And you thank God or whoever you believe in that the grocery store around the corner doesn’t close until 10?

Okay, so that was my Friday night last week. I know. It’s not a Friday night to brag about but it’s how I ended up at the grocery store at closing time.

Anyway, it was 9:50 PM and I was desperate so I shoved my feet into some slides, pulled on a ratty flannel, and bent against the borderline-torrential downpour outside. The sprint to the sliding automatic door of the G-Mart was completely deserted and the street lights had already been triggered to turn on to provide a flickering path through curtains of rain.

When the door registered my presence, it banged open, rattling the cracked plastic and echoing down the empty street. Finally shielded from the elements, I could shake out my hair and slosh the water out of my shoes, splattering the linoleum tile with droplets.

Checking my watch I saw it was already 9:55 PM and my gut twisted knowing I would either be kicked out or force the employees to stay overtime in this sorry excuse for a store.

This grocery store was bare-bones. It was made up of a towering set of shelves that separated the space into two narrow aisles; all along the other three walls were refrigerated shelves protected by glass doors. The very front of the room held a checkout counter with a foot-long conveyor belt to carry the food to the register. It wasn’t even long enough to have any of those plastic separators. One customer at a time, please.

The lights were dim, fluorescent, and for some reason, that night they had a greenish hue. My eyes went straight to my go-to spot at the back: the microwave dinner shelves. I started forward and was almost immediately bulldozed by a woman with wild gray hair and a gaunt, sunken face. She didn’t even look at me as she hauled a bright red grocery basket through the front door. She was barefoot.

“Excuse you!” I called after her, irritated, attempting to recover from stumbling back to avoid her.

Looking around, suddenly aware of my surroundings I realized that I was now alone. There wasn’t anyone at the register, the stool behind the counter sat empty. I couldn’t hear any footsteps or shuffling in the aisles, only the buzzing sound of the lights as they fought to stay on and the drum of the rain outside.

“Hello…?” I ventured, not as confidently as I would have liked, but we are all friends here so I won’t kid you. When no one responded I started forward towards my dinner. I figured they had just stepped out to go to the restroom or had gone to the back, assuming there was a back…maybe they had to run to their car.

I squatted to the lowest shelf and swiped up a classic: MEATLOAF FOR ONE. With the box tucked under my arm I stood. Directly in front of me, on the other side of the shelves of refrigerated boxes, in the dark dark recesses of the beyond-the-cold section was a pair of shiny, reflective eyes looking straight at me.

I stumbled back, dropping my meatloaf, and the eyes blinked out. They had been shiny and otherworldly like a coyote at night. They had been at eye-level and had been round and large. Not like a person. Not like a G-Mart employee.

I know this sounds like the momentary hallucination of a lonely guy who forgot to take his meds and freaked himself out alone at night in the rain. But, it’s not. I wish it was but just hold on. I’m not expecting you to believe me but just imagine if you were in my shoes and this WAS real.

Laying on the floor, shaking in my slides, I stared into the abyss of the refrigerated section. The door was stuck open from when I had pulled it all the way to its full range of motion so I could root around on the low shelves. The chill from inside wafted out, crystallizing the air and yanking goose-pimples from my exposed skin, still damp from the rain. Behind the shelves and boxes of frozen food was pitch black, but staring back into the dark dark emptiness dread curled in my throat and a pit formed in my stomach as a pair of shiny yellow eyes blinked open above the second-to-bottom shelf, eye-level with me, watching.

I scrambled back with a yelp and they blinked at me slowly. Over the crackling loud speakers I could hear the faintest buzz of a tinny rendition of “Closing Time” by Semisonic ringing out. Sliding my eyes to my watch it flashed 10:00 at me. Closing time.

I clambored to my feet, abandoning my dinner, and stumbled backward without taking my eyes away from the blinking gaze now back at my standing eye-level. I stared as another pair of shiny eyes blinked into existence beside the original pair. And another one. And another one.

My heart and my mind were racing. What was back there? Not people. Were there animals? Mutant rats? Bats? Monsters? And why were they just STARING at me?

To my right I heard a scuffling noise. Daring to look away from whatever was looking at me, I slid my gaze to trace the sound. And, behind the refrigeration shelves on the wall to my right I saw a pale, slender hand delicately wrap around a bottle of orange soda. It ever-so-slowly tipped it backwards toward the darkness and dragged it into the black, scraping along the ribbed shelf.

I whipped my head to the left only to see another hand with long spindly fingers ending in narrow nail-less points extending from the inky black, wrap around a busted-open carton of eggs, and bump-bump-bump it backwards into the nothing.

I am not ashamed to say that I high-tailed it. I spun around like a cartoon character in a cloud of dust and sprinted for the automatic door. The automatic door whose green power light was now a dull OFF. Whose “PUSH IN CASE OF EMERGENCY” sign turned out to be a handwritten sticker added for what I assume is legal reasons, clearly not safety reasons. It wouldn’t budge. I kicked it and pounded on it but the hard plastic would not even rattle in its tracks like it had earlier when I walked in.

I spun around, draped against the door and heaving, trying not to sob. Inside the fluorescent-lit refrigeration units that I was able to see from my vantage point against the entrance, I could see dozens of white almost-translucent hands. They moved as though connected to each other, a well-oiled machine doing God-only-knows what. I could only imagine what many-armed monster lay in wait in the dark back there. The only sound it made was the scrape of movement along the shelves. Otherwise, silence.

Desperately searching my mind for an idea, I gripped my hair with my hands and tried to keep the panic-induced bile down. I looked around wildly for anything that could help, anything that could get me out of here.

There! In the corner of the ceiling there was a security camera. It was pointed at the front door, clearly to discourage shoplifting. There was a little red light and it was actually blinking! If there was a security camera that was actively recording then there was probably an office or a security room or SOMETHING. I scooted to my left along the wall, trying not to look at the hairless arms connected to wrinkled hands until I reached the corner of the store. I could see straight down the aisle all the way to a simple wooden door along the back wall. An office!

Holding my breath, I steeled myself. I squeezed my eyes shut so tight I saw stars behind the lids. Then, I ran. I held my arms out in front of me and ran through my self-imposed darkness. My closed eyes were my bravery. By some miracle I only bumped into the shelf to my right once and it was only with my hand, before I reached the door.

I gripped the handle, praying for it to be unlocked. It was. I flung open the door and stumbled in, slamming it closed behind me and smashing the push-button lock into place. I fumbled for a lightswitch and when I found it, it revealed a broom-closet of an office. No windows but there was a door across from me that gave me such a surge of hope I almost fainted right then and there. The rest of the room boasted a very small desk with an ancient desktop computer on it and a folding chair. The shabby furniture blocked an easy path to the other door and as I was clamoring past it the computer whirred to life. I must’ve bumped the mouse on the desk.

Momentarily distracted from my race to freedom, I realized it didn’t even prompt a password to get in. It just opened up to some kind of security app. The home page had five different buttons, each one labeled with a location: ALLEY_ONE, FRONT_DOOR_ONE, AISLE_ONE, AISLE_TWO, STOCK_ROOM_ONE_TWO_THREE.

Feeling relatively safe for the time being, I double clicked on ALLEY_ONE. An image of a dark passage between two brick buildings absolutely obliterated by rain filled the screen. There was a door on one of the walls.

I X-ed out of the screen and clicked on FRONT_DOOR_ONE. It was a feed of the camera I had seen earlier just pointing at the front door. It still showed me cowering against the wall and as I watched I stood up and stuck my arms out in front of me before disappearing off-screen. The feed must be slightly delayed.

I X-ed out of the video and clicked on AISLE_ONE. I saw myself tearing through it, knocking bags of chips and loaves of bread onto the ground. I hadn’t realized I …

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