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 produ
ced 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.

  “You change nothing, Gregoire. I made those two. I can make more.” He turned slightly, and I found myself suddenly skewered by a pair of piercing dark eyes. So much for trying to remain inconspicuous. “That one, for example. Not quite up to my standards, but at least she already has the wardrobe.”

  Not up to his standards? Okay, so I wasn’t quite as bonelessly thin and supernaturally polished as his previous companions, but that didn’t quite qualify me for bag-over-my-head status.

  “I wouldn’t try it.” Gregoire flickered a quick glance in my direction, and I saw his mouth harden. “At any rate, you’d have to get past me first.”

  “You say that as if it would cause me some difficulty.”

  The blade descended, and Gregoire lifted the stake he carried to block the blow. Whatever wood that thing was made of, it had to be unbelievably strong. Almost at the same moment, he swept it around in a vicious arc, connecting with the vampire’s ribs in a resounding crack. Not point-first, unfortunately, but it had to have hurt like hell.

  The Trio’s leader did wince but then delivered a kick worthy of a judo master. It caught the stake at exactly the wrong angle, and it flew out of Gregoire’s hands.

  Only to land a foot away from me.

  I didn’t stop to think. There wasn’t time. I lunged for the stake, felt the smooth wood under my searching fingertips. I wrapped my hands around it and jumped to my feet.

  Gregoire didn’t seem to have missed a beat. Deprived of his weapon, he grasped one of the clothing racks, wrenched it loose from the wall, and hurled it at the vampire’s head. Black spandex and gleaming PVC rained down everywhere. I heard a curse but didn’t stop to figure out whether it had come from Gregoire or his opponent. The vampire was distracted. I had only one chance.

  I had to thrust the stake upward, since he was taller than I. Somehow I’d thought his undead flesh would offer more resistance, but the sharpened piece of wood drove smoothly through his chest. It sort of reminded me of the time I’d gone to Girl Scout camp and had to help pound tent stakes into rain-softened earth.

  At least this time I was ready for the shower of dust that followed. I closed my eyes and felt bits of dissolved vampire settle on my bare arms and my eyelashes.

  A hand descended on my shoulder, and I started, then blinked. Gregoire stood in front of me, staring down into my face with a sort of bemused wonder.

  “You killed him,” he said.

  “Well, yeah,” I replied. “Wasn’t that what you were trying to do?”

  “Of course. But he was — ” He hesitated, then said, “I’ve been hunting him for a very long time. He was a master. For a master to be killed by a complete amateur is unheard of.”

  “That so?” I brushed vampire dust off my arms and shot Gregoire an arch look. “Guess he shouldn’t have made that remark about me not being up to his standards, then.”

  “Hell hath no fury.”

  “Damn straight.”

  To my surprise, he grinned at me. “What on earth are you doing working retail?”

  “Glut of humanities majors.” Maybe I was flattering myself, but I thought I caught an admiring glint in his eyes. “Are you saying vampire hunting pays better?”

  The grin remained in place. “Somewhat.”

  I stared down at the mess of vampire explosions all over the floor and wondered whether even the store’s industrial-strength vacuum cleaner would be up to the task of getting it all out of
the carpet. Something struck me, though, as I stared down at the abandoned clothing the undead Trio had once worn, scattered amongst the new pieces that had come falling down when Gregoire pulled the clothes rack out of the wall. Corporate would have a fit if we had to declare all that a loss.

  “It’s noon,” I said. “I thought vampires couldn’t go out in daylight.”

  In answer, Gregoire bent down and retrieved one of the redhead’s patent leather platform boots. He tapped a finger against the chunky rubber sole. “Hollow. They fill these with their native earth. The sun still hurts their eyes, and they will burn if they stay out in it too long, but this helps them to blend in.”

  “I wouldn’t say they blended that well. Kind of stuck out in a crowd, if you ask me.”

  “Somewhat. But this subculture suits them well. It’s recognizable, and, as I said, the footwear suits their purposes.”

  As I was pondering that remark, Martine staggered over to us. She stared down at the mess of dust and discarded clothing on the floor and pointed at it. “He — they — what — ”

  Martine wasn’t coherent at the best of times, but this was bad even for her. Gregoire didn’t appear particularly perturbed by her babbling, however. He passed a hand over her face and murmured, “Forget.”

  The false eyelashes fluttered again, and then she stood up a little straighter. In almost normal tones she announced, “I’m going to get the vacuum,” and disappeared back into the stockroom.

  “Neat trick,” I commented.

  “It does come in handy.”

  Those blue-gray eyes suddenly seemed a little too piercing. I glanced away, then said, “I probably should help her — ”

  “I would rather you helped me, Kara.”

  Nonplused, I just stood there, not sure exactly what he meant.

  The smile returned. “You appear to have some natural talent. Or would you rather stay here and fold T-shirts?”