Morton Ormsby's Final Day
He was expecting hours, but it was over in minutes.
It wasn’t right, but that’s how it was. Morton Ormsby had accepted this principle decades ago, and as the years somehow dragged on while also flying by at top speed, he even became tolerant of it. But when those crosshairs settled on you, it was a much different story. That’s when you felt that dizzying combination of rage and helplessness, neither of which did you any good.
“This fucking place,” Chris said, shaking his head. He finished his Coke Zero with a belch and tossed the empty bottle into a garbage can with a rough, laminated photocopy of Linnea Quigley in Return of the Living Dead taped above it.
If you know, you know, Morton thought, staring at the photo for what was probably the last time.
A long-departed co-worker had hung it up in the early 2000s. Within recent years, Morton noticed that fewer and fewer of his co-workers recognized it. And Return of the Living Dead happened to be one of Morton’s favorites.
“Fucking chews you up and spits you out,” Chris finished, his face glum.
Chris was a nice guy, but he had no reason to be sad. He still had a job in the shipping department at Peterson’s, and Morton understood why. At sixty-six, Morton was the oldest guy on the dock. Chris, on the other hand, was in his late thirties. Young to Morton, but old to the twenty-somethings. That at least gave them some common ground, but it was still reasonable to say Chris was young. That meant keeping his job, even if he had been there a fraction of the time. Not that Morton could ever prove such an act of ageism. He would have to hire a lawyer, and who could afford that these days?
“It’s fine,” Morton assured Chris. “I’m no spring chicken. Retirement was on the docket, whether I wanted it or not.”
“Can you retire?” Chris asked, softening his tone, which Morton also hated. No, he couldn’t retire, and he didn’t need Chris pointing that out.
“I’ll be okay.”
Chris accepted this, but continued being monumentally unhelpful.
“Doing the math, I was in high school when you first started working here. And high school was a long time ago!”
Morton looked around as his chest tightened, his stomach fluttering like an anxious bird. Was he really never going to see this place again? It had outlasted his marriage and every place he had ever called home. He had explored a variety of hobbies, but most of them went the way of the dinosaur after about six months. This job, unimpressive as it was to most, represented the only solid consistency in Morton’s life. And now it was gone like a puff of smoke on a windy day.
“Well, I suppose,” Morton said, his cue for everyone to get back to work.
Peterson’s had never promoted him to manager, but he still commanded the room, something that often annoyed the younger guys, but that mattered little to Morton. Most of those clowns barely lasted a year, and no one noticed them once they disappeared out the door with barely a peep.
He and Chris took their places at their respective stations when Ken Norris, the on-the-books manager, entered.
“We had two from fulfillment call in, so don’t expect much else until the afternoon shift,” he reported as he thumbed through his phone. “Just ship what you have and organize the store-to-store stuff.”
He pocketed his phone and offered Morton a wan smile.
“How are you doing, Mort?”
Morton had seen his share of managers over the years, and while they ran the gamut in terms of character and ability, Ken sat at the positive end of the spectrum. He could be a bit of a hard-on when you called in sick, as he was convinced most of those claims were bogus, but if it were Morton calling in, you could bet the farm he was spending that day in bed or on the toilet. Not that it mattered now.
“Hanging in there,” Mort replied, offering Ken a smile that far exceeded his.
“Sorry to be losing you,” Ken said, resting his hand on the polished, well-kept surface of Morton’s station.
The awkward gesture knocked over two of Morton’s Funko Pops, but what could he say? The station was no longer his. After today, Morton and his Funko Pops were in the wind.
“I fought for you to stay,” Ken continued. “But they still did you dirty. I’m sorry, brother.”
“I appreciate you looking out,” Morton said, clapping Ken on the shoulder.
“Want to grab a beer this weekend?”
Morton did not. He had never done much socializing with his co-workers outside this place, even the ones he liked. Starting now seemed like a fool’s errand, but at least Ken meant well.
“Shoot me a text,” Mort replied.
It was the politest “No” he could offer when he didn’t give much of a shit in the first place. It was time to get to work. Morton had an entire rack of designer jeans, dresses, and blouses to package and ship, along with a full shelf of shoes. And if there was one thing he refused to give up, it was his ability to end a shift without an article of clothing in sight.
“Did you get your last check?” Ken asked, to which Morton shook his head.
Ken stepped away from the station and waved his arm.
“Come on then. Let’s go get it.”
The woozy combination of helplessness and rage hit Morton again, almost causing him to lose his balance. In just a few hours, he’d be gone and promptly forgotten. As Morton followed Ken to the office, he wanted to protest and tell Ken that giving him a paper check was a waste of materials. His pay had been direct deposit for the last decade. He also wanted to say that he’d just grab his check at the end of his shift because he was ready to work and still serve a place that had treated him like a bag of garbage. But no words came.
Ken, on the other hand, talked endlessly about nothing, stopping to say hello to other employees and even whistling as they traversed the store. They were almost to the office when they ran into Porter, one of Morton’s younger co-workers. As per usual, he was ten minutes late and wearing his earbuds (a no-no that Ken never bothered to enforce). He regarded them with a countenance that Morton had always found maddeningly vacant. It was as if the kid had just enough brainpower to do basic day-to-day operations and little else.
“Hey,” he intoned dully, stopping to sweep his mop of curly blonde hair back.
Ken smirked and pretended to look at his watch. Porter responded with a shrug.
“You know it’s Mort’s last day, right?” Ken said, overlooking the infractions as he always did.
Porter turned his empty hazel eyes to Mort.
“Good luck, man.”
Morton felt his bile rise as he fought every urge to slug this little shit. Would Porter ever get laid off? Maybe, but in all likelihood, he’d just stop showing up one day, leaving Ken and the rest of the guys in the lurch. Luckily, Ken seemed aware of Morton’s foul mood.
“We have a whole bunch of returns to scan and ship,” he told Porter. “Get started on those. We’ll be back in a minute.”
Porter gave Ken a thumbs-up.
“You got it.”
Although Porter headed for the dock, Morton wasn’t surprised to see him stop and gab with the sales gal who always wore the short skirts. As Morton and Ken entered the office, Ken gave Morton a “What can you do?” look, to which Morton decided there were a lot of things you could do, but wisely kept them to himself. Ken walked over to a gray filing cabinet and yanked the top drawer open. He began flipping through a stack of envelopes cinched together with a thick rubber band.
“To state the obvious, I wish it were him and not you,” Ken said. “And I’ll tell them that when our units-per-hour start to dip. Won’t be long before that happens.”
“I’m thinking tomorrow,” Morton said, leaning against the plain white wall.
“Well, not that soon,” Ken said, going on the defensive. “It’ll probably be a few weeks before the higher-ups notice the numbers going down. And I’ll be happy to explain it. What I might say is—”
A short, shrill scream cut him off.
“What the hell?”
Ken tilted his head like a confused terrier. He looked funny, but Morton shared his confusion. The scream sounded like it came from an adult. Screaming children were an essential part of a department store’s soundtrack, but a screaming adult? In all his years working at Peterson’s, Morton was almost sure he had never heard that.
“Maybe the girl talking to Porter realized she was talking to Porter,” Ken chuckled.
Morton didn’t know about that, but he did know that the scream had knocked him out of his slightly somnambulistic state. Just as Morton was gearing up to tell Ken exactly what he thought of this place and how it had treated him, he heard another noise, this one even more jarring. It sounded like a succession of firecrackers exploding. It was several seconds before Morton realized what was going on.
“Holy shit,” he hissed through his teeth. “Those are fucking gunshots!”
Ken’s droopy eyes grew so wide that Morton half-expected them to pop out of his skull.
“Oh my God!” Ken said, pulling out his phone with shaking hands.
He said something else, but the screaming and gunshots were deafening, even in the isolated space of the office. Ken and Morton both hit the floor, with the former clutching his phone to his ear.
“Yes, I’m at the Peterson’s in the Santa Anita mall, we’ve got a shooter—”
More gunshots. Louder. Closer.
Morton closed his eyes and waited for it to be over, because why not have it end this way? What did he have to look forward to after today? Another retail job where he’d be starting at the very bottom at sixty-six? No thanks. Ken was doing his best to give the 9-1-1 operator details, but Morton could hear the panic in his voice as his breathing grew fast and wheezy. There was another string of gunshots, followed by more screaming, but it sounded further away. Maybe they’d make it out of this. The gunshots faded until Morton was sure the perpetrator had gone outside. He began to army-crawl toward the door.
“Mort!” Ken hissed. “What the hell are you doing?”
Morton ignored him. This was still his store for a few more hours. He reached up and opened the door a few inches to peer out. The store looked mostly empty, but he could hear a faint chorus of sobbing and babbling. He opened the door further and noticed several bodies strewn around the aisles, their blood crawling over the pristine white tile in jagged, irregular patterns. Morton felt movement next to him and saw that Ken had joined him, his phone still in hand.
“Oh, Jesus,” he sobbed when he saw the bodies. “Oh, Jesus.”
The shooting had lasted roughly a minute, and in that brief time, Morton had managed to forget about everyone but him and Ken. Had Chris escaped? Given he was tucked away on the dock, he had probably run out the door normally used by custodians to take the trash to the dumpsters. Good for him. Porter hadn’t been so lucky, splayed out on the bloodied tile, his face completely obliterated. If it weren’t for his mop of curly blonde hair (now streaked with red), Morton wouldn’t have recognized him. The object of Porter’s affection crawled out from behind the register, her face blanker than Porter’s had ever been, present time included. Blood, likely his, covered her from head to toe like a Jackson Pollock painting. Morton wanted to feel sorry for her, but he was having a pretty shit day himself. But even with the horrors that had just unfolded, it was hard to deny opportunity. Morton turned to Ken, whose ruddy face was a mess of snot and tears.
“If you need me, I’m available.”