Al had rushed forward and thrown himself headlong and flat under the dropping security gate, twisting onto his back as he did so. Even as his nose brushed the falling metal as he passed under it, he tucked his feel laterally and the gate just scraped the soles of his Docs. His inertia carried him forward in a long slide, his age-worn leather jacket skimming across the mirror-polished mall floor, and before he'd come to a stop he'd put slugs into the gun-arms of the two stunned rent-a-cops.
Congratulating himself on his action-movie awesomeness, his eyes went wide as the gate was then ripped from his moorings and tossed through the space at the unfortunate security guards, a weird foam flowing through in its wake. No time to see the bleeding guards' fate, he scrambled backward to avoid both hazards.