In the backroom, Tyrone and Bee had just finished cleaning house using the forklift when the emergency calls began to come in from the front. Faster than walking, moving her complaint spewing backside over to the break room was still a priority. So, they headed out of the backroom with Karen riding atop a pallet.

As they turned a corner, they frightened a small group of local goth girls who had come in to mock the conformist normative nature of the retail fashions on sale. The fact that they still had several cute shirts situated in their shopping cart was quite telling, however.

“Hey! Watch where you’re going!” called a girl with pale white skin, and black everything else.

“Get to the break room!” called Tyrone.

“Don’t tell me what to do!” shouted the girl.

“Hey, if you want to be eaten alive that’s on you!” he called back just before Bee turned a corner. Karen squawked like a chicken while she held on for dear life. The turn had been taken fast and sharp.

It was then that someone came over the intercom to inform the store that they were under attack by zombies and hooligans. The goth girls stared at each other incredulously for a moment then glanced over to the now disappearing forklift. It was not long before they took off after it. Fashion mockery was one thing, but neither of them wanted to be as dead as they liked to appear in public.

They were crossing the main aisle in the hopes of finding the break room, since they had no idea where it was, when the roar of motorcycle engines cut through the building. The screech of tires drew their attention.

A man with a bright red mohawk came riding toward them with a nail-spiked bat in hand. His tongue hung out of his mouth a little too far for a normal man, and a look of obscene joy was plastered across his face.

The girls who regularly dressed as though they were in love with death screamed in fright as the man barreled toward them. Were it not for the sudden appearance of a flying blur that knocked him from his motorcycle, he would have run them down.

The blur performed an artful summersault then landed lightly on its feet to reveal Ashton. Her tail fluffed sideways, and her ears perked up as she prepared to meet the next wave of oncoming hooligans. She did spare a glance back at the girls. “Head to the breakroom. It’s next to the pharmacy.”

“Yes, ma’am!” called out one the girls, now pale for reasons that had nothing to do with makeup. They did not even take the time to disrespect authority in the name of rebellious pride. Instead they rushed over to the offered place of sanctuary, a new respect for normatively dressed conformist girls beating in their formerly blackened hearts.

It was unfortunate, but Ashton knew that she was the only one who could do anything about this situation. There was no one else in the store who had any capacity to fight back beyond the bare minimum. Perhaps if firearms were not banned on the premises, there might be a few people carrying a weapon. Without a gun, normal people would find it hard to fight off something like this gang of hooligans.

The man she knocked from his motorcycle stood up and dusted himself off, barely the worse for wear. He was an eighth level hooligan and built as tough as he looked.

“Bitch, I just had that bike painted!” snarled the man.

Engines roared nearby as more hooligans came down the aisle. Ashton knew that she could not fight them all at once, so she fled toward softlines with the hooligans set in behind her. The clothes racks and aisles were used to good effect as the invading monsters tore through the place. No matter how hard they tried, they could not catch the elusive fox.

Light shimmered to the left of a hooligan. He barely had time to register the movement before claws tore through his face. He screamed as a fire that only he could feel rushed along the wounds and ignited his mohawk. Head burning, he flailed around wildly and cried for help.

Ashton was long gone before the man’s mohawk had burned to a sad little nub. Unfortunately, it was not enough to kill him. He was injured, and had many negative status effects, but these monsters were not going to go down easy.

Already weakened by the battle with the zombies, her life force was running on fumes. She needed to find a place to hide for a few minutes, but it would be difficult to make it back to the break room as things stood.

Forced to relent in her persistent usage of her illusionary stealth mode, she instead tried to move in a more typically stealthy fashion. Motorcycles roared as the hooligans continually circled the lanes around the area in which they thought that she had chosen to hide. Several minutes passed while she moved slowly around the area in search of a speedy exit. They kept her trapped by constantly circling her location.

Those few who had gone inside to try and get her had met with serious injuries early on. Now they were trying to come up with a different tactic. This allowed her to slowly regain some of her spent life force, though not much.

The leader finally stopped circling and reached into his leather vest. He pulled out a Molotov cocktail, already lit somehow, then raised it up. “Burn ‘er out!”

A few of the other bikers followed suit, and they all began to toss Molotovs into the softlines section. Clothes immediately went up in flames. Molotov after Molotov was taken out, but to their great dismay the addition of real fire to the store caused the fire alarm to go off. The sprinklers rained water down, rapidly soaking everything, including the bikers.

Hair plastered to her head, and her shirt rendered see-through by the water, Ashton rose from where she was hidden. Things had just turned heavily in her favor. Her powers were illusionary but worked best when a bit of a thing already existed in the environment. The more that the object of her illusions’ focus existed in the area, the easier it was for her to produce a major effect. In the case of an area soaked with water, her frost powers would be that much more potent.

Ashton expended most of her recently regained life force. Given the fact that a large amount of water continued to fall like rain, and puddled up on the floor, it was well within her power to do what came next. She broadcasted her power over the area with a sudden violent image.

A sudden frozen hell descended on the store. The water pouring down turned into pelting ice. It coated everything in the illusion of frost, but more importantly it turned the floor into a mass of ice for everyone except for her. In their eyes a hard and bitter winter had set into the store. Bikers panted for air as the freezing cold attempted to steal their breath away. The air, in their minds, was so cold that it burned the lungs.

A few of them attempted to continue to ride, but the ice caused them to slide sideways and crash into various merchandise. Their bikes were useless now, and even after her lack of energy forced her to drop the image a few seconds later, it continued to linger in their minds as a residual effect. Freezing to the extent that he began to lose a small amount of life force per second, the leader of the bikers tried to get his crew to leave.

Unfortunately for the hooligans, every step they took led to them falling to the ground in a hilarious manner. It became nearly impossible to lift their bikes due to the slickness of the floor, and they were forced to make a run for it while repeatedly falling on their asses along the way.