Mall Rats & Monsters / Season 1, Episode 1
Opening Night
EPISODE 1: OPENING NIGHT
CHAPTER 1: THE GRAND OPENING
August 15th, 1987.
The Galleria of the Americas opened its doors at ten o'clock in the morning, and by noon, it was the most exciting place in Cedar Valley, Illinois.
Five levels of retail paradise rose beneath a soaring glass atrium. Neon lights spelled out store names in electric pink and blue. Escalators hummed with chrome efficiency. The fountain in the center court shot water thirty feet into the air, synchronized to "Take On Me" playing through the state-of-the-art sound system.
It was the largest shopping mall between Chicago and the Mississippi. It was supposed to put Cedar Valley on the map.
It was supposed to be the beginning of something wonderful.
Standing in the food court, seventeen-year-old Jessica Chen watched the crowds with the practiced cynicism of someone who'd spent her entire summer working at Orange Julius.
"This is insane," her best friend Marcus Williams said, joining her with a tray of free samples from the cookie stand. "I've never seen this many people in one place."
"It'll die down. By next week, everyone will remember that they have actual lives."
"You're such a buzzkill, Jess."
"I'm a realist."
But even Jessica had to admit there was something magical about the Galleria. The way the light filtered through the glass ceiling. The smell of new carpet and fresh paint. The promise of a hundred stores waiting to be explored.
If she'd known what was waiting beneath the foundation, she wouldn't have come near the place.
CHAPTER 2: THE CREW
By the time the mall closed at nine, the grand opening had exceeded all projections.
Over fifty thousand people had passed through the doors. Every cash register had rung constantly. The parking garage had been full since eleven AM.
And five teenagers had decided to stay after hours.
"This is the stupidest thing we've ever done," Jessica said, crouched behind a display of neon leg warmers in Claire's Boutique.
"You say that every time," Marcus replied. He was already pulling items from his backpack—a boombox, a Polaroid camera, a six-pack of Tab cola stolen from his parents' fridge.
"Because it's true every time."
The plan was simple: hide until the security guards finished their rounds, then have the entire mall to themselves until morning. A private party in the biggest building any of them had ever been inside.
The crew had come together over the summer, bonded by boredom and the shared experience of being social outcasts at Cedar Valley High:
Jessica Chen—Chinese-American, honor student, determined to escape this town on a full scholarship to anywhere else. She was only here because Marcus had guilted her into it.
Marcus Williams—Black, charismatic, the kind of guy who could talk his way into or out of anything. He'd been Jessica's best friend since kindergarten.
Derek Sullivan—white, stocky, the football player who didn't quite fit with the other jocks. He had a secret passion for Dungeons & Dragons and a louder passion for Metallica.
Tamara Reyes—Latina, artistic, dressed in thrift-store finds that she'd modified until they were gallery pieces. She carried a sketchbook everywhere and rarely spoke above a whisper.
And finally, Brandon Pierce—the new kid, arrived in Cedar Valley three weeks ago, still mysterious enough to be interesting. He was pale, quiet, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies that had immediately endeared him to the group.
Five teenagers.
One mall.
And something ancient waiting in the darkness below.
CHAPTER 3: THE WAIT
The security guards made their rounds at 10:30, 11:15, and midnight.
The crew moved from hiding spot to hiding spot, barely breathing as flashlight beams swept past their locations. Claire's Boutique to the back hallway behind Foot Locker. Foot Locker to the storage area near Waldenbooks. Waldenbooks to the service corridor that ran behind the food court.
"Why are there so many guards?" Derek whispered.
"New mall. They're probably paranoid about theft." Marcus was grinning, high on adrenaline. "Don't worry. After the 1 AM check, they'll stay in the security office watching TV until morning."
"You seem very sure about that."
"My cousin worked mall security in Peoria. Trust me."
At 1:17 AM, the last guard completed his sweep and disappeared into the elevator that led to the security office on the fifth level.
Marcus waited exactly sixty seconds, then stood up with his arms spread wide.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first annual Galleria of the Americas After-Hours Extravaganza!"
"Keep your voice down," Jessica hissed.
"The security office is soundproofed and five floors up. Relax." He hit play on the boombox, and Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" filled the empty food court. "Now who wants to go skating?"
CHAPTER 4: THE PARTY
For the next two hours, the Galleria belonged to them.
They rode the escalators the wrong way, racing each other from floor to floor. They explored the arcade, playing free games on machines that hadn't been locked properly. They posed for Polaroids in front of the fountain, which had been left running because someone forgot to turn it off.
Marcus found the intercom system and serenaded the empty mall with his impression of a DJ, complete with fake radio station jingles and dramatic introductions.
Tamara discovered that the art supply store had left several canvases by the loading dock, and she claimed them with the enthusiasm of a prospector striking gold.
Derek and Brandon challenged each other to a contest of who could eat more free samples from the candy store, which ended when Derek threw up in a decorative planter.
And Jessica—despite her best efforts to remain the responsible one—found herself laughing harder than she had in months.
"Okay," she admitted, sitting on the edge of the fountain with her feet dangling in the water, "this was a good idea."
"Was that a compliment?" Marcus asked. "From Jessica Chen? Someone mark the date."
"Don't push it."
"I'm just saying, it's August 16th, 1987. The day Jessica Chen admitted that I, Marcus Williams, occasionally have good ideas."
"I said 'a' good idea. Singular. One."
It was Brandon who first noticed something wrong.
"Hey," he said, pointing toward the glass elevator that ran up the side of the atrium. "Is that supposed to be doing that?"
The elevator was descending.
From the fifth floor.
Where the security guards were supposed to be.
And the lights inside were flickering in a way that made something cold settle in Jessica's stomach.
CHAPTER 5: THE DESCENT
They scattered immediately—instinct driving them toward the hiding spots they'd used earlier. But something stopped Jessica before she could dive behind the nearest planter.
The elevator wasn't slowing down.
It should have been stopping at each floor—that was how elevators worked. But this one was dropping straight from the fifth floor to the ground level without so much as a pause.
"That's not right," she said.
"Who cares? We need to—" Marcus grabbed her arm, tried to pull her toward cover.
"No, look. The lights."
They all looked.
The elevator was full of something. Something that absorbed light, that seemed to press against the glass walls, that moved with a horrible, organic rhythm.
"What the hell is that?" Derek's voice was higher than Jessica had ever heard it.
The elevator reached the ground floor.
The doors opened.
And for three eternal seconds, nothing happened. The darkness inside stayed still, stayed contained, stayed where it was supposed to be.
Then it poured out.
CHAPTER 6: THE HORROR
It wasn't darkness.
It was bodies.
Hundreds of them—small, malformed, covered in glistening black skin that reflected the neon lights in sickening rainbows. They moved like insects, like rodents, like nothing Jessica had ever seen in any nature documentary or horror movie.
They spilled across the polished floor of the atrium, spreading in every direction at once.
And they were fast.
"RUN!" Marcus's voice cut through Jessica's paralysis. "FUCKING RUN!"
They ran.
Jessica had never been particularly athletic, but fear gave her wings. She sprinted across the food court, vaulted over a table that she wouldn't have been able to jump normally, and didn't look back even when she heard the sounds behind her—chittering, scrabbling, hungry sounds that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"The escalators!" Derek was ahead of her, already leaping onto the non-moving stairs. "Go up! Get away from them!"
They climbed.
First floor to second, second to third, third to fourth. Jessica's lungs burned. Her legs screamed. But she kept climbing because stopping meant dying, and she wasn't ready to die in a shopping mall at seventeen.
Behind her, the sounds grew louder.
She risked a glance back and immediately wished she hadn't.
The creatures were climbing too. They moved across surfaces—floors, walls, the sides of escalators—with equal ease. And there were so many of them. More than could have fit in a single elevator. More than could have fit in the entire building.
Where were they coming from?
CHAPTER 7: THE FIFTH FLOOR
They made it to the fifth floor—the administrative level, mostly offices and storage, with the security office at one end.
"The guards!" Tamara gasped. "Maybe they can—"
"The guards are dead." Brandon's voice was flat, empty. "Those things came from the security elevator. That means they already got to the guards."
"You don't know that."
"Yes, I do."
Jessica wanted to argue, but she knew he was right. Whatever had been in that elevator had started somewhere, and the security office was the only thing on the fifth floor.
"We need to barricade ourselves," she said, her mind racing. "Find a room with one entrance. Block the door. Wait until morning when the maintenance crew arrives."
"That's six hours away."
"Then we better find a good room."
They chose the storage area at the far end of the hall—a large space filled with Christmas decorations that wouldn't be needed for months. It had a heavy metal door, no windows, and enough distance from the elevators that they might hear any approach.
Derek and Marcus dragged a massive artificial tree in front of the door. Tamara piled boxes of ornaments on top. Brandon checked every inch of the walls for vents or gaps where something might crawl through.
And Jessica stood in the middle of the room, trying to catch her breath and understand what the hell was happening.
"What were those things?" Derek's hands were shaking. "What... what the fuck were those?"
"I don't know."
"They came from inside the mall. From the basement or something. They—"
"I don't know, Derek."
"We need to call someone. The police. The army. Someone."
"With what? The phones are in the security office." Jessica's voice was steadier than she felt. "Which is probably covered in those things right now."
CHAPTER 8: THE HISTORY
It was Brandon who started talking first.
He sat in the corner, knees pulled to his chest, and spoke in the same flat voice he'd used since the elevator opened.
"I read about this place before we came here. The history of the land, I mean. Before it was a mall."
"Brandon, this isn't the time—"
"Let him talk," Marcus said. "We've got six hours. Might as well understand what's trying to kill us."
Brandon nodded slowly.
"This land used to belong to the Potawatomi. Before the settlers came, before Cedar Valley existed. They had a name for this place. I found it in an old book at the library. They called it 'the mouth.'"
"The mouth of what?" Tamara asked.
"They didn't say. The records from that time are... incomplete. But the stories mentioned things that came out of the earth here. Things that only emerged at night. Things that the Potawatomi sealed away using rituals that have been lost for two hundred years."
"You're saying there's ancient evil under the mall?" Derek's voice cracked. "That's... that's a movie plot. That's not real."
"Those things downstairs looked pretty real to me."
Jessica thought about the construction process she'd watched all summer. The delays that no one had explained. The rumors about workers who quit suddenly, who refused to come back no matter how much they were paid. The night shift crew that had been fired en masse and replaced three times.
"They broke the seal," she said slowly. "When they dug the foundation."
"That's my guess."
"So what, we're dealing with some kind of... underground demon horde?"
"I don't think they're demons. I think they're something older. Something that was here before humans, before the Potawatomi, before anything. Something that lives in the dark places of the earth and only comes out when someone opens the door."
CHAPTER 9: THE APPROACH
The sounds started at 3 AM.
Scratching. First distant, then closer. Then everywhere—above them, below them, all around them. The creatures were searching. The creatures were hunting.
The creatures knew they were here.
"They can smell us," Brandon whispered. "Or hear us. Or something. They know."
"The door will hold." Marcus was trying to sound confident. He wasn't succeeding. "That door is industrial. They can't—"
A heavy impact shook the entire room.
Then another.
Then a rapid-fire series of impacts, like a dozen bodies throwing themselves against the metal simultaneously.
"They can," Jessica said.
The door began to buckle.
CHAPTER 10: THE ESCAPE
"There has to be another way out." Jessica was scanning the room frantically. "A vent, a hatch, something—"
"I checked," Brandon said. "There's nothing."
"Check again!"
The door buckled further. Through the gap, Jessica could see glistening black limbs, reaching, grasping, hungry.
"Wait." Tamara was staring at the ceiling. "What's that?"
A hatch. Small, almost invisible against the acoustic tiles, but definitely there.
"Where does it go?"
"Does it matter?"
Derek and Marcus boosted Jessica up first. She pushed against the hatch and felt it give, revealing a dark space above—some kind of maintenance crawlway that ran between floors.
"It's tight, but we can fit. Come on!"
They climbed one by one. Tamara, then Brandon, then Derek, then Marcus. Behind them, the door finally gave way, and the storage room filled with a tide of black bodies and clutching limbs.
Jessica slammed the hatch closed and heard impacts immediately—the creatures trying to follow, trying to reach them. But the hatch was smaller than the door had been. Too small for more than one or two to push at once.
"Move," she said. "We need to move."
CHAPTER 11: THE CRAWL
The maintenance crawlway was nightmare-inducing in its own right.
Dark, cramped, filled with dust and old wiring. They moved on hands and knees, following the beam of Marcus's flashlight (thank God he'd brought it), trying not to think about what might be waiting in the darkness ahead.
"Where are we going?" Derek's voice echoed strangely in the confined space.
"Away. That's all that matters right now."
"But away to where? The mall is full of those things."
"There has to be somewhere they haven't reached. Somewhere they can't go."
"What makes you think that?"
Jessica didn't have an answer. She just kept crawling.
The crawlway branched multiple times, offering choices that all looked equally bad. Left or right. Up or down. Toward the sounds or away from them.
They chose away, always away, following the path that seemed quietest.
Until they heard voices.
Human voices.
CHAPTER 12: THE SURVIVORS
The crawlway opened onto a small maintenance room on the third floor—one that contained three very frightened people who weren't teenagers.
"Holy shit." A man in a janitor's uniform scrambled backward, clutching a mop handle like a weapon. "Who—where did you come from?"
"Same place you did, probably." Marcus dropped down from the crawlway and immediately raised his hands to show he wasn't a threat. "We're survivors. Like you."
The janitor's companions emerged from the shadows: a woman in a Sears suit, clearly some kind of manager, and an older man wearing a security uniform.
"You're kids," the manager said. "What are you doing here?"
"We could ask you the same thing."
"We work here. We were closing up when—" She stopped, unable to finish.
The security guard looked worse than any of them. His eyes were glassy, his hands shaking. Jessica noticed blood on his uniform.
"Ted," the janitor said gently. "Ted, come on. Focus."
"They got Martinez," Ted whispered. "They got him right in front of me. Pulled him into the vent. I heard him screaming for a whole minute before it stopped."
Jessica felt sick.
"How many guards were on duty tonight?"
"Six. I'm... I'm the only one left."
CHAPTER 13: THE PLAN
They had to work together. There was no other choice.
Eight survivors. Dozens—maybe hundreds—of creatures. Six hours until the mall opened and help might arrive.
If help arrived. If anyone outside knew what was happening. If the creatures didn't find a way to escape into Cedar Valley and turn this nightmare into something much, much worse.
"We need to get to the roof," Jessica said. "It's the only place they might not reach."
"The roof access is on the fifth floor." Ted's voice was hollow. "Near the security office."
"Then we find another way."
"There is no other way. The building codes required a single roof access point. Fire regulations."
Marcus laughed—a bitter, sharp sound. "Fire regulations. Great. We're being killed by ancient underground monsters, but at least we're up to code."
"What about the parking garage?" Tamara asked. "The top level is open. We could signal for help from there."
"The garage entrance is on the ground floor. We'd have to go through them to get there."
"Unless we went outside the building." The manager—her name tag read PATRICIA HOFFMAN—was studying something on the wall. A map, Jessica realized. An architectural map of the entire complex.
"There's a maintenance corridor," Patricia continued. "It runs from the loading dock on the second floor to the parking structure. It's not public access—most people don't even know it exists. But if those things are focused on the main floors..."
"They might not know about it either."
"It's worth a try."
CHAPTER 14: THE JOURNEY
They moved at 4 AM.
The loading dock was on the opposite side of the mall from their current position—a journey that would take them through the movie theater, past the department stores, and down two levels of escalators.
A journey through the heart of creature territory.
But they had no choice.
The janitor—his name was Carlos—led the way. He knew the building better than anyone, knew which doors locked and which ones didn't, knew which routes the creatures seemed to favor and which they avoided.
The manager, Patricia, brought up the rear. She had found a fire extinguisher somewhere and carried it like a weapon.
Ted the security guard walked in the middle, still shell-shocked but moving.
And the five teenagers moved as a unit, protecting each other, watching each other's backs.
The movie theater was the worst.
Twelve screens. Twelve dark rooms. Twelve places where anything could be hiding.
They moved through the lobby as quickly as possible, past the concession stand with its smell of stale popcorn, past the ticket booth where someone had left a radio playing Top 40 hits into the empty darkness.
"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears echoed through the silence.
It was almost funny.
CHAPTER 15: THE ENCOUNTER
They almost made it through without incident.
Almost.
The creature dropped from the ceiling when they were ten feet from the exit—landed directly in front of Carlos, who barely had time to raise his mop handle before it was on him.
Jessica had only seen the creatures at a distance before. Up close, they were worse.
The size of a large dog. Covered in that glistening black skin that seemed to absorb light. No eyes that she could see, but a mouth—God, the mouth—that split its face in half, lined with teeth that looked like glass shards.
It bit Carlos's arm.
He screamed.
Patricia swung the fire extinguisher, connecting with the creature's side and sending it tumbling. But more were coming—drawn by the noise, emerging from the theater doors, dropping from the ceiling tiles.
"RUN!" Jessica grabbed Carlos—blood streaming from his arm—and pulled him toward the exit. "EVERYONE RUN!"
They burst through the doors into the main corridor.
Behind them, the creatures gave chase.
CHAPTER 16: THE DOCK
The loading dock was just ahead.
Jessica could see it—the industrial doors, the maintenance corridor entrance, salvation—but the creatures were faster than they should have been, closing the distance with every second.
"We're not going to make it," Derek gasped.
"Yes we are. MOVE!"
They reached the doors.
Marcus hit the release. The industrial doors began to slide open—too slowly, way too slowly.
"Come on, come on, come ON—"
The doors opened wide enough to squeeze through.
They pushed Carlos through first, then Tamara, then Brandon, then Derek. Patricia went next, turning to spray her fire extinguisher at the approaching horde.
The white foam did nothing to stop them. But it slowed them down, just for a moment.
Ted and Marcus went through together.
Jessica was last.
She felt something grab her ankle—something cold and wet and impossibly strong. She screamed, kicked, felt her shoe come off, and dove through the gap just as the doors slammed shut.
Impacts. Dozens of them. The creatures throwing themselves against the metal.
But the doors held.
For now.
CHAPTER 17: THE CORRIDOR
The maintenance corridor was narrow, industrial, and blessedly creature-free.
They moved as fast as Carlos's injury would allow, Patricia using her belt as a tourniquet while they walked. The bite was bad—deep and jagged—but he was still conscious, still moving.
"How much further?" Marcus asked.
"Maybe two hundred feet. The corridor opens onto the parking structure's third level."
"And then?"
"And then we get to the roof. We signal for help. We wait for morning."
It seemed almost too simple.
But they had made it this far.
CHAPTER 18: THE LIGHT
The parking structure was empty.
Not just of creatures—of everything. The cars that should have filled the levels were gone, either driven away during the chaos or never there in the first place.
They climbed.
Third level to fourth. Fourth to fifth. Fifth to the open roof, where the night sky stretched above them and the lights of Cedar Valley glittered in the distance.
"We made it," Tamara whispered.
Jessica wanted to believe her. But something felt wrong.
The sky.
She looked up, and her blood went cold.
The stars were wrong. Not missing—the stars were still there. But they were arranged differently, formed constellations she didn't recognize, pointed to directions that didn't exist.
"Guys," she said. "Look up."
They looked.
"What the hell?" Derek's voice was barely audible. "That's not... that's not our sky."
"The mall," Brandon said slowly. "It's not just sitting on top of something. It's connected to something. A doorway. A passage to wherever those creatures come from."
"So we're not in Cedar Valley anymore?"
"We're in Cedar Valley. But we're also... somewhere else. Somewhere that's bleeding through."
Below them, in the mall, lights flickered and died.
And from the darkness, they heard singing.
Not human singing.
Something older.
Something that had been waiting for this night for a very, very long time.
To be continued...