by Moore, Gabi
He’d expected these four. Something was in the air today. The people who worked in the mall, both human and not, told each other what was going on at any given time. There was an informal network of gossipers who were sure to let the store managers and their employees know if gangs of shoplifters or building inspectors were on the prowl. The mall was free of most thieves because the ones which escaped, or were lucky enough to be arrested, warned the others what waited for anyone who was caught. No one wanted to spend an hour or two in Karanzen’s holding cell. It wasn’t what was done to you; it was what you saw while you were inside it.
Thor was aware of the true nature of the mall and what it hid the first day he opened his store. He cast the runes on the counter that day and they told him all he needed to know. The place stood over an entrance to something ghastly. It seemed Valhalla was relocated and placed on the plains of Ohio for people to find at their own pace. But something was brewing inside that clock tower and he didn’t like it. Should the sensations he received become too intense, he would look elsewhere for a store location.
The word on the sales floor was that the mall management had it in for some tall kid who would be in the mall all week. He was trying to find something and they didn’t want him to locate it. What it was, no one knew, but the cleaners had unsuccessfully tried to keep him from reaching a pharmacy in the other section of the mall. Today he was in Thor’s side of the mall and things were stirring in the air. He’d seen the cheerleaders with a whole group of enthralled men who watched them in silence as they did their routines in the main concourse. It wasn’t the sort of thing the mall management would normally permit, so they had to have some kind of reason to have them there.
“Would you like to see anything?” he said to the group as they walked inside. “We have some of the finest steel on this side of the planet.”
Dion walked over the nearest case and looked inside. The prices were steep, but he could see the signs of the metal folding in some of the knives. He noted the expert care which went into the construction of the handles. Each of these weapons was designed to hold up under the worst situations imaginable. Not one of these blades would snap if pressure were applied to them.
Emily couldn’t understand the reason for this shop, but she followed Dion into it because he said the security staff wouldn’t come inside. Right now, there were no other people in it besides themselves.
Sean was surprised at how Emily reacted to the display of cold steel. She walked around and looked at each one with keen interest. For the first time she turned her attention away from Dion and stared at the edges and patterns before her. None of them could be handled unless the storeowner took them out of the case, but it didn’t stop her from gazing over them. The knives and swords, which he had on display behind him, held her fascination. What was it that attracted her attention in a way he’d never seen until now?
“And you must be the kid who has attracted the mall management’s attention,” Thor said to Dion. “I don’t know what you did, but they are looking for you today. They don’t seem to want to prevent you from coming into the mall, which makes me believe you’re not a thief. So you must have something they really want down in the tower.”
“It’s what they don’t want me to possess,” he said. “There are places in this mall they never want me to reach. If I succeed in my quest, they never will be able to carry out all their plans.”
“Plans? What kind of plans? I didn’t think that bunch in the tower cared about a thing other than the bottom line.”
“I’m not sure what they’re up to,” Dion said. “But whatever it is, they want me out of the way. They’ll do anything to keep me under control. Right now, they’ve managed to get several people into the mall I need to see. So long as I have to see them, they can control my access.”
“How long have you had this store?” Sean interrupted. “It looks pretty new.”
“Five weeks, at this location. I was in several places before I signed the lease for this one. I hope I made the right decision coming here. The foot traffic is much better than the old place, but the sales haven’t picked up that much. I’ll see how they look in the upcoming months. I had three other locations before I came here. None of them seemed to generate the foot traffic I needed to make this a going concern. Two of them had enough space for my foundry, but I’ve since moved all my equipment out to a shed behind the house where I live. I decided it was time to separate the production end from the sales part. I spend two days in the shop and five here. Haven’t had a vacation in years, but it’s the price you pay for being your own boss. I spent years on the renaissance fair circuit chasing sales that way, but I got tired of all the moving around. Finally decided to settle down in one location and here I am.”
“Wow,” Sean said, “you’ve always made swords and knives for a living? That is so cool. It sounds like the life we’d all like to lead.”
“Not so exciting when you have to get a blade forged to have something to sell because you don’t have any money left to pay bills. I’ve been up until two in the morning pounding steel because I needed inventory for a show. I’ve worked as a vendor all weekend only to have one sale, a ten dollar polishing cloth. But at the same time, I’ve sold enough steel in one hour to make the next month tasty. You can never tell in this trade how you will do from one year to the next. And by the way, I’ve done a lot of jobs beside this one while I was learning the trade.”
“What kind of work did you do besides this?” Emily said. This Viking, or whatever he was, seemed pretty cute and she wouldn’t mind spending more time in the store.
“I had plenty of stupid jobs,” Thor told her, “but the one I liked best was being a stunt dummy for the cops. I’d go back and do that one again because it was fun.”
Now the rest of the group was interested. There was no one else in the store and Thor leaned back on the counter and began to spin his tale. He’d told it so many times that he could recite it in his mind. He didn’t care, the day was slow and they seemed to want to hear it.
“I was working nights at a diner as a cook while I built my stock of knives up. One day I had a customer come into the diner and start talking about how he was a professional target for the cops. I couldn’t believe what he told me. It turns out when they train cops; they use Hogan’s alleys or mock-ups of buildings and cars for them to simulate real situations. The guy belonged to some kind of actor’s guild, which hired themselves out to the cops for training. You see, they need to make these scenarios realistic to be useful. So what do they do? They hire people to be the bad guys in the getaway car or the bum on the couch who has to be woken to tell them where the suspect is hiding. It sounded like fun, so I asked him if he was looking for anyone. This was before I had the long hair and beard, but I guess I look enough like a bad guy so he hired me on the spot. It was a great job for about a year, I had a blast.”
“Sounds dangerous,” Lilly said. It wasn’t her idea of a career to be smacked around by the men in blue with guns. It sounded downright scary.
“Not really. The guns are using blanks and they’re not even allowed to use those most of the time. My last time I was playing a guy passed out on the couch at a party because they were trying to find a drug dealer. I was supposed to play possum and they were going to force me to wake up and give some information. When I sat up, a man jumped out from behind another couch, aimed a wooden pistol at the cop trainees and yelled ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ By the rules of the scenario, they were all dead and had to start over again. Also, I got to play the chase vehicle with a beat-up Ford while some rookie cops ran after me in an old cruiser. They managed to force me off the road, and then they had to use the proper method to get me out of the vehicle. Failed that one too when I pulled a dummy gun out of my waistband, pointed it at the cop walking up to me and said ‘Dead!’ Yeah, it was a lot of fun, but my own calling needed attention and I had to quit.”
“Well, at least you get to do what you want to do,” Sean said. “We�
��re about to graduate high school and I don’t think any of us know what to do. Except Dion.” Sean glared at Dion with the last few words.
Emily noted Sean’s animosity, but said nothing about it. She knew there was no love lost between the two, but it was too bad for Sean, as he’d agreed to come along. For all she cared, Sean could be trained as an Elvis impersonator.
“It’s not a bad career,” Thor told them, “but I wish the money was better. At least I had some careers before this one to compare. Again, the police dummy was fun, but it made me worry about the cops.”
“Why?” Lilly asked him.
“The ones with a military or previous cop background had some smarts. The ones right out of college who’d decided they wanted to be a cop; they had a long way to go. It takes years to build up those survival skills. I worry there are too many of them who are going to make a wrong move because they’re too new to be on the street.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Dion said. He still didn’t understand why neither Karanzen nor any of his security staff would come into the store. It made no sense, but perhaps there was some contradiction in this part of the mall which kept them out. He reminded himself to look it up when got home. There was a well-thumbed copy of the 141414, or The Elemental Worker’s Desk Reference in his room. Supposedly, they were coming out with a new edition. This one weighed in at ten pounds, he couldn’t fathom how heavy the next one would be.
Dion turned to the windows. Still no sign of the security staff. Good. They could leave this place and get over to the hobby shop where Jupiter Hitch worked. If everything went according to plan, perhaps he could get home by the early evening and figure out how to find the next Elemental Grandmaster tomorrow.
“Thanks for your hospitality,” he told Thor, “but we need to keep moving. Our destination is down the next hall and we need to get there before the mall comes up with another barricade. It seems to be good about throwing them up in my way.”
“Sometimes I think there is no mall management or builders,” Thor sighed. “I can’t help but wonder if this place just grew overnight and we’re all inside the belly of some primordial monster. No one has ever seen the mall managers and I’m not sure they even exist.”
They left the store and proceeded down the hallway where the hobby shop was located.
Emily didn’t know a lot about hobby shops, they seemed to appeal to the boys in her school, although they quit using them after a certain age. She remembered a few kids down the street who were heavily into model rocketry and who scared the stuffing out of her father when one of their attempted launches went off course and landed in their backyard. The kids jumped the fence the next minute and retrieved it, but not before her father had yelled at them.
She watched a few of their launches, some that had better success than the one which landed in her yard. To hear the kids tell it, they were going to the moon. It all seemed like a big Fourth of July show to her, with the exception of the colored sparklers. Soon, the neighborhood kids had moved onto something else and were no longer interested in the space patrol. But the memory of rockets into the sky remained with her.
All I have to do is get the map from him, Sean thought to himself. Just get the map away and hand it to that cheerleader. So easy. Then what would Emily think when her beloved Dion didn’t have so much power after all? It sickened him that Dion could get those girls to swoon over him just by walking into the room and he had no way to get them to look in his direction. All he had to do was find a way to get it out of his hands and transfer it to Randi.
Dion felt something from Sean. He couldn’t put a name to it, but this kid Emily had dragged into the quest seemed to have something going on inside him that wasn’t good. It was a brooding nightmare and he could feel it. There was something very wrong with his head and the way he looked at the world. What the hell was wrong with him? Why couldn’t the girls see it? He could understand why Emily wouldn’t notice anything, but Lilly? She was very close to him. He could feel her attraction and enjoyed the sensation. Emily, she had some pull in his direction too, but it wasn’t as intense as what he felt from the other girl. Funny how he could start to feel these things, it had to be a by-product of his years of elemental studies.
Dion made a mental note not to turn his back on Sean or drop guard. If he was under the influence of some elemental, he could easily betray them all and never realize it. He made certain to keep him in visual range at all times.
A few minutes later, they came to the hobby shop. Dion stopped everyone and looked around the perimeter. He wanted to make sure no further surprises awaited them. After yesterday’s unexpected interference from the ghoul cleaners, he was ready for everything. He closed his eyes and concentrated with his other senses, but felt nothing. The only movement he saw was from a small shop, which sold wristwatches, on the other side of the hall. There was only one lady working inside in it and she didn’t pay him any attention. If the elementals or mall has something planned, he was unable to figure out where the attack would originate. For now, it appeared they were holding back. Which was fine with him.
Dion walked right up to the store and pushed on the door. It didn’t move at all. He pushed on it again and looked down. He turned the clasp was turned and found the store was locked. Dion turned and saw the notice in the door: “Back In Thirty Minutes”.
“The mall won’t like that,” Lilly said to him when she saw the sign. “He could get fined for not being here when he’s supposed to be. They don’t like it when the store doesn’t open on time. Shoot, even the security guards walk around and note what time these places are open. It’s part of their contract and I would expect he’d know it.”
Dion rubbed his hand on his forehead. “Unless this is a plan by the mall to delay everything,” he said. “Get the owner away from the store so I can’t meet him and have my second mastery handed to me.”
They stood there in front of the store and waited. “He’ll have to come back eventually,” Lilly said. “You think it might be safe to stay here and just wait for him?”
“I’d like to, but I’m not sure if that is such a good idea with these elementals trying to get in the way. I can guarantee you that the mall is behind his absence. They probably have him down in an office right now going over a list of stupid issues they want him to see just to get him away from the shop. They might have found a reason to get one of his employees out of the way too. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
It was Emily who first saw the cheerleaders. They didn’t appear at once this time, but out of the crowd. She saw the first one walk up to them and stop. Then another one came down the hall and blocked their retreat in that direction. Another appeared from the other side and stood watch in the other direction. More of them emerged from the crowded shopping mall and filled in the gaps between the first two and the rest. Soon, there was a solid cheerleader semi-circle that surrounded them. The shoppers knew to avoid them and continued to walk past the half circle as they made a barrier around the four friends.
Sean stood close to the one called Randi. He was closer to her than any of the other cheerleaders. She looked at him with her deep blue eyes and he felt his knees go weak. He turned and looked at the people he stood with and noticed Emily sliding up to Dion for protection. Lilly was already holding onto his hand from the other side. Sean felt his inner rage take control of him. Oh, it was fine for Emily to drag him along to this for a small thing, but if she was really scared, it was Dion she ran to for help. Not Sean who’d carried the banner for her longer than he could remember. What was it that made her look down on him? Perhaps it was the time his mother browbeat him into calling her to come along to a family picnic. They’d only gone out once, but his mother decided that, since his cousins had girlfriends along, so should he. Sean was humiliated and he knew all his mother wanted to do was show her off. And perhaps let everyone know her introverted son was halfway normal. It never happened and it was months before he could phone her again. He still shuddered at the
memory of calling her up from his mother’s prodding.
Randi stood there and looked at him directly. Her eyes shifted in the direction of the map under Dion’s arm. He knew exactly what she had in mind. She smiled at Sean, allowing him to see the white teeth beneath her lips. Sean looked across at her and saw the clear, tanned skin on her arms and the glow in her hair. She’d done her best to make herself up to be the kind of young woman Sean had dreamed about all his life.
The shoppers continued to walk past, oblivious to what took place in front of them. If someone had stopped to take the tableaux in, it wouldn’t have made much sense. All they would have noticed was a squad of high school cheerleaders in their tight little uniforms standing out in front of four kids of the same age. Unless the onlooker knew anything about the mall or who built it, they would be clueless as to what was unfolding. A close examination might show the hair of the cheerleaders blowing behind them although there was no wind or air currents in the mall. The cheerleaders all had long hair, even the ones with curls. It rose up behind them in a golden and black pattern to merge into one harmonious mane. The stood there and remained silent while people avoided them as they went through the mall.
Dion turned and saw the eyes of Sean fixated on one of the cheerleaders. He realized what was taking place before him and tried to break their hold, but it was too late.