James Mare, the scruffy manager of the EB Games at North Pines Valley Mall, stands outside the fire-scarred facade of his store and gestures in a straight line from the doorway to the Karl’s Key Emporium Kiosk. A group of police officers write in their notepads around him.

“That’s where the pre-order line ended,” he says and brushes his nose with his thumb. “And here’s where we created the wall of fire that allowed us to make our escape into the parking lot.”

It’s been a strange week for Mare and the three teenage members of his staff. “About a week ago we started seeing the beginnings of a line forming for the Left 4 Dead 2 midnight release,” he tells Rick, the lead detective. “It was a group of seven or so. They stood outside the store with their heads cocked, completely unresponsive to the world around them. They had such blank, lifeless stares.”

One of police officer is distracted by a barely-working television looping the Left 4 Dead 2 commercial. His superior snaps in his face.

“It’s not untypical for a game to attract fans,” Mare continues glumly. “But these young men were like something out of a horror movie. They didn’t look healthy.”

Mare crosses his arms and scans the overturned tables in the food court. “I guess I could have stopped it right then and there and told them all to go home, but I didn’t. I mean, how was I supposed to know that in seven days their numbers would have grown so quickly?”

Briana Alpquist, the branch’s sporty brunette assistant manager, was the first to notice that the crowd was growing to an unmanageable size. “I came in early to open up on Saturday morning and the whole food court was packed,” she says while placing burnt copies of Modern Warfare 2 back on the shelf. “People were standing on tables, even.”

“Politeness went right out the window,” adds Lucas, an EB Games clerk who was injured so badly that night he had to be revived with a defibrillator. “People would say they were holding a space for someone who was in the bathroom then pretend they didn’t know them when they came back. It’s like they’d forgotten how to be human.”

Reily Bittlebaum was still in training that night. “I’d never seen anything like it. They would shout at us through the windows. It wasn’t any language I’d ever heard before. They really wanted to play this game. I guess the demo was really good or something.”

The situation turned ugly an hour before midnight, while Mare and his staff prepared the store for the influx of customers. According to the police report, the riot started when a man in line attacked a security guard who had politely asked that he move out of the walkway. After that, all bets were off.

“I knew when the glass started to crack that we were in trouble,” Mare recollects. “That’s when I told Briana to get the stash of automatic weapons we keep in the safe.”

As the army of Left 4 Dead 2 fans helped themselves into the ventilation system, Reily made pipe bombs out of Ubisoft promotional materials and Lucas stuffed an instruction manual in the mouth of the vodka bottle he brought to work.

The glass shattered and the four employees bolted for the parking lot, making snappy remarks to one another as they ran. They fired wildly into the crowd, killing dozens and injuring at least a hundred more and sometimes shooting one another. At one point, Mare tossed the Molotov cocktail on the ground, setting his potential customers alight.

“It wasn’t us they wanted. It was the game. And that’s what they got,” Briana says to the lead detective. She shivers and touches the place on her neck where she was bit by a ravenous gamer. “Sorry. Sometimes I get this urge to buy Valve merchandise.”

Though casualties were high, the city doesn’t plan on pressing charges against the fearless foursome who, against all odds, escaped a seemingly impossible situation. “I’m proud of my staff,” Mare says. “We stuck together and didn’t leave anyone behind. That’s the EB Games way.”

Additional reporting from Hardcasual’s Canadian correspondent, Filipe Salgado.