High Noon at Hot Topic

High Noon at Hot Topic

By
Christine
Pope

Copyright © 2011 Christine Pope

Smashwords Edition

This story appeared in a slightly different
format in Issue No. 8 of
Astonishing Adventures
Magazine
.

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HIGH NOON AT HOT TOPIC

Christine Pope

I knew he was trouble the second he walked
into the store.

Oh, not your usual sort of trouble — not the
sticky-fingered tween who thinks she can smuggle out a bottle of
nail polish and a couple of statement buttons with no one noticing.
Not the privileged princesses from the hills who just loved to take
a buttload of clothes into the dressing room and leave them all
there for the “staff” to pick up. And not even the wannabes in long
black coats that my friend Joanna and I referred to as the
“knee-hilists” (usually pronounced in a fake German accent similar
to the one employed by the would-be kidnappers in
The Big
Lebowski
).

Anyway, I was used to the hipsterish flotsam
and jetsam that floated in and out of the store. This guy didn’t
match any of the types who tended to haunt the place.

For one thing, he wore a long brown coat and
a brown fedora. Now, it was cold enough outside that the coat
itself made some sense, especially for wimpy SoCal natives who
thought anything below 70 degrees was freezing. However, no one who
knew what they were doing would be caught dead wearing brown inside
a Hot Topic. Black was the color of choice, with maybe a variation
into dark gray and army green, or some red and even hot pink (in a
purely ironic sense, of course) thrown into the mix.

The fact that he was male and at least in his
early thirties just clinched his complete fish-out-of-water status.
Sure, we got some guys; they usually gravitated toward the vintage
band T-shirts. And while we tended to skew younger, we did get some
women in the store who were probably flirting with thirty. Since I
had less than eighteen months to go before I hit the big three-O, I
wasn’t about to pass judgment. At least those thirty-something
women weren’t working in tween poser-punk hell.

So, taken one at a time, the stranger’s
oddball traits weren’t that strange. Taken together? They set off
pretty much every internal alarm I had.

I sidled out from behind the counter,
adjusting my name tag so he couldn’t possible miss the “Kara”
emblazoned on it. Tuesdays were pretty dead, especially at midday,
and I only had one other staff member as backup. Unfortunately, my
backup wasn’t Joanna, who I pretty much trusted to handle anything
short of the zombie apocalypse. No, that day I was stuck with
Martine, who looked great as a model for the store’s wares but who
wouldn’t recognize a shoplifter if they paraded past wearing an
outfit composed entirely of price tags.

“Get the register,” I murmured to her. She
was in the middle of refolding a stack of striped stockings and
looked up at me with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze made even more
Bambi-esque by her thick eyeliner and fake lashes.

“The what?”

“Register,” I hissed. “
Now
.”

Those lashes fluttered like moths around a
street light, but at least she had enough brains to recognize the
authority granted me as assistant manager and abandoned her sock
sorting for the cash register. Good thing sales were slow that day;
Martine couldn’t be trusted to make change. Luckily the
predominance of plastic these days saved her ass most of the
time.

Once more into the breach
, I thought,
not for the first time marveling at how my degree in English lit.
had propelled me into an exciting career in retail. Still, I didn’t
see any way to avoid talking to the man in the brown coat and hat.
I had to make sure he was at least mostly harmless.

“Can I help you?” I asked the stranger. He’d
paused in front of a rack of “vintage” band T-shirts, but he wasn’t
fooling me; I saw the collar of a white button-down shirt peeking
past the heavy overcoat.

He turned. Cool blue-gray eyes scanned me
briefly, then paused on my name tag before he redirected his
attention to the ranks of bogus shirts, where Led Zeppelin mingled
incongruously with the Clash and the Sex Pistols.

The dismissal was obvious, but I stood my
ground. My internal alarms were still going off, and they’d been
right enough times over the years that I wasn’t about to ignore
them now. “Our shirts run a bit small, so you might need a
large.”

“It’s not for me.”

Just a hint of an accent. I couldn’t place
it. East Coast? Definitely not from Southern California, though. “A
gift?” I persisted.

Then he did turn toward me, a smile hinting
at the corners of his mouth. Damn. I hated it when customers who
were actually cute came into the store — it didn’t seem
professional to flirt with them, but considering how cramped my
social life was, I’d stepped over the line a time or two. Oh, well.
What Corporate didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. And the alarm bells
had been quieted a bit by that smile. He didn’t look like a
pedophile or a shoplifter.

“For my nephew,” he said.

Somehow I got the feeling that the nephew was
purely mythical, but I knew better than to push it. “So is he more
of a classic rock type, or is he into punk or goth or — ”

I let my words trail off because I could tell
he wasn’t listening. He’d gone alert, like a hunting animal
scenting its prey.

I swiveled slightly to see what he was
staring at. And then I realized the Trio had entered the store.

Even after working at this particular branch
for more than a year, I still didn’t know their names. They always
paid cash. No ersatz T-shirts for them, either. They bought the
higher-priced Lip Service and Morbid Threads clothes, along with
some cosmetics. No jewelry or any other accessories. Oh, that
didn’t mean they went without. But (as far as my untrained eyes
could tell) they wore the real stuff. The red stones on their
fingers and at their necks glittered like very expensive blood.

One man, two women. Joanna and I used to make
up elaborate stories about them — that they ran a high-end fetish
club, or that they were some sort of musicians or performance
artists. Hard to know for sure, since of course they said almost
nothing when they came into the store, except for the few times
they’d wanted to special-order something or asked whether we had a
particular size back in the stockroom.

Now, I’ll admit that all three of them were
worth staring at, and I don’t even swing both ways. They all had
glossy, perfectly straight long hair that fell almost to their
waists. One of the women had black hair, the other dark red. The
man’s hair was also black, although with a pure white streak at
each temple. They had the kind of skin that could only be achieved
through a series of brutal dermabrasion sessions, and their bodies
— well, let’s just say that every time they came in the store, I
vowed to put in an extra hour at the gym.

That said, I was just a little irritated by
the attention the stranger was paying to them. A minute ago, he’d
looked halfway interested in me. Now it seemed as if I didn’t
exist.

I cleared my throat, even as the Trio headed
to the back of the store where the pricier merchandise was located.
“So what size is your nephew?”

Again that hint of smile, as if he knew I was
only playing along. “Kara, you know I don’t have a nephew. By the
way, I’d advise you to duck.”

“Wha — ” I began, but I didn’t have time to
finish the word. He was already pushing past me, headed toward the
back of the store in the Trio’s wake.

As he moved, I watched him reach inside that
incongruous brown coat. When he produced the hidden object, I
realized why he’d chosen a floor-length outer garment — not the
usual sort of attire for L.A., even in the middle of January.
Because he held in his hand a long stake of some pale kind of
wood.

Despite his warning to duck, I began to
follow him. The last thing I needed at that point was some loon to
commit mass murder in my store. If nothing else, the paperwork
involved would be deadly.

It happened so fast, I wasn’t quite sure what
I was seeing. The stranger looked like an ordinary enough man, but
no man I’d ever known moved quite like him. If I’d blinked, I would
have missed his progress from the T-shirt racks at the front of the
store to the section in the back devoted to our more glam apparel.
The music blaring from the speakers overhead drowned out any sound
he made.

Any sound I could hear, that is. At the very
last second one of the women — the redhead — turned toward him. Her
mistake.

The sharpened piece of wood pierced her right
through the breast, a scant inch above the edge of her leather
bustier. Blood should have gone everywhere, but it didn’t. Instead,
her mouth opened in a wide scarlet-painted O, her head snapped
back, and then she exploded outward in a shower of dust. Her
clothes — black skirt, leather bustier, platform boots — fell to
the ground.

The shriek I’d been about to let out caught
in my throat. What the ever-loving
hell
—

I heard a scream, but it wasn’t mine. The
black-haired woman screeched with the sound of about a hundred
fingernails being dragged down a blackboard at once, and her
companion spun around. The walking stick he held (an affectation
Joanna and I had laughed about on several occasions) expanded
outward in a lightning-flash of movement, becoming a scary-looking
staff tipped in sharp steel.

The stranger’s admonition to duck suddenly
sounded like a great idea. Since the two remaining members of the
Trio were focused on him, I took the opportunity to drop to the
ground and begin scuttling across the floor to the relative safety
of the checkout counter.

An unfamiliar voice. “Gregoire. You
disappoint me.”

I crawled behind the counter and saw Martine
crouched there, false eyelashes fluttering with such speed I was
surprised they didn’t come flying off. Since she was closer to the
phone, I whispered fiercely, “911!”

“Wha?”

“Dial 911. Nine one frigging one!”

A shaking hand reached up and dragged the
phone off the counter. I grabbed it before it could clatter to the
ground. My own fault; I should have known Martine couldn’t manage
something as simple as dialing three numbers.

But when I put the receiver up to my ear, all
I heard was a weird, fast dial tone, the kind you sometimes get
after a disaster like an earthquake or something when everyone’s
tying up the lines. Crap.

I put the phone down on the floor and peered
around the corner of the counter. Martine stayed where she was,
back pressed up against the wall. Not that I expected her to do
anything more than that. At least she hadn’t fainted yet.

The stranger said, “Not the first time, I’m
sure.”

The leader of the Trio stood unmoving, staff
still clenched in his left hand. His female compatriot appeared
unarmed, but if I’d had someone wearing her expression facing me in
a club, I would have taken off my earrings and then tried to find
the nearest exit. “You’re slipping, Gregoire. In public?
Really?”

“Opportunity is everything,” returned
Gregoire. His brown coat flapped open to reveal a wholly
unremarkable white shirt and flat-front khakis. He feinted with the
stake, a snake-like movement toward the black-haired man he faced,
but at the last second he snapped to the right and drove the stake
through the woman’s chest instead.

Another explosion of dust, this one made more
spectacular by the sudden of flash of the Trio leader’s
steel-tipped staff. I heard a tearing sound; the tip of the blade
caught Gregoire’s lapel, but he stepped back in enough time that
the only damage he appeared to sustain was the rip in his
overcoat.

“Kill them, if it amuses you,” the
black-haired man said.

Man
? I decided it was time to stop
kidding myself. Human beings didn’t explode into dust when you
drove stakes into their hearts. No, kids, only vampires were
supposed to do that.

“It doesn’t amuse me. It’s just what needs to
be done.”

“Always so righteous. So tedious.”

These words, delivered in a deceptively
languid tone, were followed by another vicious swipe of the
vampire’s blade. I couldn’t quite figure out how Gregoire managed
to keep evading those blows. I knew if I’d been in their path I
would’ve been sushi.