Just another night at work or so I thought

    It was a normal Tuesday night at MegaUltraMart, or so I thought at the time.  I parked my vehicle in the parking lot, made sure the doors were locked, and ensured that the headlights were turned off so I wouldn't need a jumpstart in the morning.  After all of that was settled, I walked into the building and used the MegaUltraMart Associates app on my work phone to punch in and start my shift.  I took a scenic route to the employees only area to peruse the impulse buys near the registers.  We had a bunch of Pokemon cards, candy bars, and various as seen on tv items, but I didn't really have time to take a closer look.  I was mostly just getting myself into the right mindset to begin serving customers and stocking shelves.

    Once I reached the employees only area, I checked the dry erase board to see where the bosses were sending me for the night.  My assigned aisle was the chips aisle, so I grabbed a topstock cart, an l-cart for overstock, bags for disposing of plastic, a boat for cardboard, and a printer.  Then I made my way out to the salesfloor to get started.  As I reached my assigned aisle, I noticed that the second shift associates had staged a couple pallets there so I didn't need to worry about finding a pallet jack quite yet.

    As soon as I put my carts and stuff where I needed them, I got started working the freight.  I had two pallets in the aisle plus two more waiting outside the aisle so I'd definitely be busy at least until lunch time.  While I was occupied with that, time passed, customers came and went and someone made announcements about the time as closing time approached.  The first couple were nothing unusual, but then the one about five minutes left really caught my attention. Whomever it was making the announcement said we were closing and that we would reopen at six a.m. when the curse was lifted.  Nobody had told me about any curses but I just dismissed it as a coworker joking around and continued stocking.

    A few minutes later, I saw customers running for the doors in terror so I began to notice something was a bit awry.  Then our maintenance lead, Dan approached me and said "Come with me, buddy boy.  I need your muscles for something."  I asked him what was going on and he continued "This goes way back to my days in Louisiana.  I ticked off some members of the Vampire Mafia and they vowed that I'd rue the day I'd crossed them.  I thought I had escaped their wrath by moving to Pennsylvania and working here, but I guess I was wrong."

    "So what's the plan, Dan?  Should we store-use some stuff from sporting goods to fend them off,"  I asked.

    "Actually, I've got a better plan" said Dan as we reached the area in the back where the maintenance department keeps its mops and other cleaning supplies.  "We're going to use these" he said while snapping a couple mops in half against his knee. "Stab the vampires with the pointy end and then we'll clean up the mess afterwards."

    I didn't have a better plan, so I just shrugged and went along with it.  So we went on the offensive with our improvised weapons against the vampire gangsters invading our store.  Things were going well but then our boss, Jerry, noticed I was out of my aisle and said "Steve, what on Earth are you doing?  You still have three and a half pallets of freight left!"

    I gestured all around me and said "I'm a little busy defending the store now, but I'll get it done as soon as I can."  Jerry said "Get it done" and went about his business.  Unfortunately, the momentary distraction allowed one of the vampires to get a good swing in and knock me to the ground.  As it was going in to attempt to bite me, Dan quickly whacked it with his mop, sending it tumbling sideways and away from me. Then he finished it off with a forceful stab to the heart with the sharp pointy end of his mop.

    Once I recovered and scrambled to my feet, we began making our way through the store and fending off the vampire threat. It took some time, but we eventually fought them all and restored things to something resembling normalcy. I eventually finished stocking the chips after we tossed the vampires out of the store and had someone run the floor scrubber to clean up the mess.  Jerry was a little miffed that it took me so long, but was appreciative that Dan and I had defended our store from the unholy invaders.  I just had to know how Dan had done all that so I asked him "how did you do that?  I thought you were just the maintenance lead here at MegaUltraMart."

    "Well that's where you'd be wrong, buddy boy," he replied.  "My real name is Dan Helsing.  I'm a distant cousin of the famous Van Helsings and a well trained vampire slayer."

    

    From then on, I always made sure to keep some garlic and the broken mop handy in case the vampires ever returned.  Dan of course ordered a couple more mops to replace the ones we had used and continued his role as maintenance lead and store defender.