Supermarket Holdup

I was in an supermarket that looked as though it had come straight from the early 90’s, shopping in one corner near rows of freezers and a cargo lift when there was suddenly a lot of commotion.

I turned around to investigate and it appeared as though the shop was in the process of being robbed by multiple masked assailants.

The group then began to fan out through the shop to try and control the shoppers. I ended up making eye contact with one of them and recognised that it was one of my exes’ dog walkers (who had always been a bit of a stereotypically, yet misunderstood bad kid).

She was still the same age, wearing a bandana over the lower half of her face but I still easily recognized her.

When she saw that I recognized her she removed the bandana and was just excited to explain that this was what she was doing with her life now.

A call came in via a walkie-talkie and she said she had to go, but her other dog walker friend was also part of her crew and we’d probably see her and to say hi.

They then pretty much switched positions with one walking away as the other came towards us. She was visibly older, a little taller and had a scar on her face but otherwise looked pretty much identical and wasn’t even wearing a bandana.

She was also excited to see me and blurted out her boss was another person I knew, an old work colleague from years ago who’d recently become mute after being attacked.

They were just here for money stored in a safe as the supermarket was part of a money laundering operation and they’d already opened the safe so it would all be over soon.

For some reason a woman who’d been shopping in the store had tried surreptitiously taking a photo of the group of robbers however the camera flash went off which this second girl didn’t like and then walked away telling her that she would regret doing that.

Then everything cut and we were at a table in a room transferring the photo taken on the phone to a really ancient computer via a thick cable. As the photo transferred the computer started making data transfer noises while a progress bar chugged along.

After the transfer had completed we ended up with two files but with identical names which was impossible. After this they couldn’t be moved or renamed either.

The first was the picture taken in the supermarket of the girl but her face was smudged badly enough so she was completely unrecognisable.

As we were examining this first picture, the image viewing software automatically started to slideshow into the second picture which depicted a young girls lap, taken by herself from her torso showing a ball of loosely scrunched up tin foil that you could just about make out a dark disfigured face in.

I noticed there was no camera in the reflection and the letters R-A-W were embossed in the foil. The woman who’d taken the picture started screaming as she recognized the face and started hammering at the keyboard to get rid of the picture which almost immediately changed to the first image in the gallery that she’d taken before after a couple of seconds the slide show moved again back to the tin foil picture and she started screaming again.

All the time the floppy disk noises carried lowering in pitch and speed, becoming regular. On that as I awoke from the screaming I realized the floppy disk activity noise was actually my girlfriend snoring.