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  Dee’s other hand slipped beneath Brix’s T-shirt, probed urgently at her flesh.

  Dee broke the kiss briefly to say, “You have no idea how hot it got me when you knocked me on my ass. You can hit me some more if you want.”

  Brix let the girl kiss her a few moments more, but her arousal was fading. Because a fresh piece of disturbing insight had invaded her brain. This inexplicable, out-of-character thing she was going along with was happening because it was what the movie wanted to happen. A bit of superhot girl-on-girl action to titillate the guys in the audience. Okay, there was no actual audience (that she knew of), but she was seized by a belief that the basic principle was correct. So now, anger was displacing arousal.

  Time to put a stop to this shit.

  Time to exercise some free fucking will and break from the goddamn script.

  She broke the embrace and shoved Dee roughly backward.

  Dee laughed and took this as additional erotic provocation. A direct reaction to the information she’d disclosed about her masochistic streak. She came right back at Brix and got shoved right back again. This evoked still more laughter, louder this time. It had to be audible to anyone out in the main room now. This embarrassed Brix, even as it provided additional fuel for her anger. She didn’t want anyone, Jason especially, knowing what had transpired here.

  Dee came at her more aggressively the next time, propelling her backward and slamming her against the wall. Then her hot breath was on Brix’s ear. “See? I can be rough, too. You like it, don’t you?”

  Brix made a fist of her right hand.

  She would beat this crazy bitch unconscious, if necessary.

  But it wasn’t necessary.

  Because that was when the crack of the rifle resonated again after a long intermission.

  She heard someone scream, followed by sounds of chaos in the main room as everyone presumably dove for cover. Then there was another crack of the rifle. And another. And the tinkling sound of splintering glass. Brix jerked slightly at the sound of each shot, but Dee barely reacted. There were more shouts from the main room. And someone was screaming about someone named Gavin being dead. Gavin had to be the guy in the Melvins shirt. Poor bastard.

  Dee put her mouth against Brix’s ear again. “This had to happen eventually. Tucker got fed up with waiting me out. He’s coming in close to finish off the guys.”

  “We have to help.”

  “Fuck that. Let them die. Then I’ll just let Tucker have what he wants. That’ll calm him down. Hell, he can have both of us.” She laughed. “It’ll be better that way. Tucker and his rifle protecting his lesbian girlfriends from the zombies.”

  And to think this bitch called me crazy.

  Brix punched Dee in the side of the head with all the strength she could muster, sending the girl staggering sideways into another wall. That accomplished, she launched herself out of the cramped room before Dee could recover. She dropped to the floor to crawl out to the main room. Most of the candles had been extinguished, but she could make out the prone forms of the men on the floor between the rows of booths.

  All of them except for Gavin.

  Who sat slumped over a table in one of the booths, his brains leaking from a massive hole in his head.

  She spotted Jason and scuttled rapidly toward him. They clasped hands as she reached him. She could feel his fear and desperation in the intensity of his grip.

  “I think we’re fucked, Brix.”

  Brix shook her head. “No. No way are we giving up. There should be a store room in the back. We’ll get to it and find a rear way out.” She tugged at his hands. “Come on. It’s our only chance.”

  Jason tightened his grip on her hands. “He could circle around and pick us off back there, too.”

  “Maybe. And maybe not. But if we stay here, we’re doomed for sure.” She tugged at his hands again. “So come on.”

  But then Brix felt something heavy press into the small of her back, stopping her cold. She turned her head and glanced up to see Dee’s shadowy form looming over her. That was Dee’s boot pressed against her back. “Stay where you are, you teasing bitch.” And now Brix saw something else. Something that took her breath away. It was clasped in Dee’s right hand and was aimed at the back of Brix’s head.

  A Glock. Much like the one she owned.

  Dee raised her voice to shouting level and addressed the unseen shooter. “Tucker, it’s Dee! Listen to me! I’m giving up! I’ve got the last gun these fuckers had. All you have to do is come in here and finish these people off, then you can have me. What do you say?”

  There was a brief, pregnant silence.

  And then a deep male voice—closer-sounding than Brix expected, close enough to startle—responded, “All right. I’m coming in. Don’t pull any shit or you’re dead, too.”

  “You got my word. One other thing, Tuck. Don’t off this other chick. We could have some fun with her.”

  Tucker chuckled. He sounded closer than ever. “Oh, I know. Been thinking the same thing since she went runnin’ up that hill.”

  Brix knew she had no choice but to act and act now. It might earn her a bullet in the back of the head, but she had to take the chance. The alternative wasn’t worth contemplating.

  She braced her hands on the floor and propelled herself upward with all her might. Dee let out a yelp as she was knocked off-balance. Tucker shouted, and as Brix surged to her feet she saw his big form come charging into the adjacent billiards room. Dee was lying on the floor. The Glock was still clutched in her right hand. Brix couldn’t tell whether she was conscious or not. No time to worry about that.

  Before Tucker could enter the main room, Brix fell atop Dee and wrestled the gun from her hand. Dee screamed and tried to grab it back as Brix brought it to bear on Tucker, who had just come through the door.

  Tucker froze a moment. He looked stunned to find himself facing this end of a gun barrel. The moment was very brief. In the next he was fighting to get his rifle aimed at Brix. But he wasn’t quite fast enough.

  Brix’s finger slipped through the Glock’s trigger guard, rested on the trigger for only a microsecond.

  Then she squeezed off a shot that slammed dead center into his chest. Tucker wasn’t a big man. He was actually slightly built. But there was a look of big surprise on his face in that last moment before he toppled dead to the floor.

  Dee screamed.

  She was still screaming when Brix aimed the Glock at her head.

  Cade and Ben both yelled at Brix, beseeching her not to do it.

  Brix’s tone was unadulterated contempt. “You’d all be dead if she’d had her way. Fuck this bitch.”

  Dee stopped screaming. She looked up at Brix through eyes swimming with tears. “Please…I’m so…s-sorry…”

  Ben spoke up then. “You can’t do this, Brix. It’s…wrong.”

  “The hell it is.”

  Brix put a bullet through Dee’s tear-streaked face.

  The bespectacled one Dee had called Jeff screamed and cursed her. Brix was sorely tempted to shoot him, too. Sorely tempted to shoot all these stupid motherfuckers, except for Jason. They weren’t real, right? Not in the truest sense anyway. They weren’t from her world. And this world wasn’t real. Was it?

  She sighed.

  The only thing that stayed her hand was the simple fact that she didn’t have real answers to those questions. She was only guessing at the nature of this fiction-derived world. Maybe it was real in its own way.

  The sound of groans and thumps from the billiards room diverted her from this line of thought. She looked that way and glimpsed several shadowy forms through splintered windows. Staggering forms. Zombies. They had stayed offstage for this little dramatic set piece, but now they were back in force. Of course they were. There was no other logical next act.

  She looked at Jason. “Now would be a good time to get the fuck off your ass.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Jason got upright and stared in the direction of the
billiards room as the first zombie came lurching through the door. Brix shot it in the center of its forehead and it toppled backward into the zombie behind it.

  She looked at Jason. “Let’s find that back way out.”

  “Right. Good idea.”

  He stumbled after her in the darkness as they went searching for the exit.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The guy who had saved her from certain death-by-chainsaw in the woods was no longer screaming. The screams had given way to wretched-sounding moans punctuated by the occasional wail of unrelenting agony. The poor son of a bitch. Lashon’s anger, already at fever pitch, ratcheted higher and higher as she listened to the sounds of her rescuer’s anguish, her rage achieving near-nuclear levels by the time she reached the bottom of the staircase.

  The living room was empty and kind of dark, lit only by the low-wattage red bulb of a floor lamp. The red light was an odd touch. It gave the room a French bordello vibe. The only thing missing to complete the illusion was a few whores lounging around in slutty lingerie. Brighter light was visible through an archway at the far end of the living room. The sounds of suffering were coming from that direction.

  Lashon remained where she was a moment longer. She had one last chance to bolt from this place. The front door to the house was to her left, only a few long strides away. She could be gone from this place of nightmares and blood in a matter of moments.

  Other sounds issued from the space beyond that archway.

  Music playing at a low volume. Type O Negative’s “Black No. 1”. A song she had always liked. Given the current context, she doubted she would ever again be able to feel the same way about it.

  She also heard voices. Young and bright-sounding. Cheery.

  Laughter. A lot of it.

  All so incongruous juxtaposed against her recent savior’s blubbering pleas for the mercy of a quick death. Lashon’s resolve returned. There was no real choice here. Just a solemn duty to perform. A favor owed. One she would repay in blood.

  She had the knife.

  And the gun. The great equalizer.

  You can do this, she told herself yet again. You really can.

  Kill them. Kill them all.

  Lashon checked the automatic pistol’s safety to confirm it was in the off position, exhaled a deep breath, and got going again. The living room’s floor was carpeted, which masked the progress of her lightly treading feet. She was thankful for that, at least. The creak of a hardwood floor might well have given the game away far too soon. She put her back to the wall as she moved past a leather sofa and neared the bright light shining through the archway.

  The voices of the man’s tormentors became clearer as she inched closer to the archway, an in-progress conversation coming into focus above the swelling chorus of the Type O Negative song.

  “That’s a good boy, Johnny. Way to thoroughly chew every last bite of your meal. I mean, yeah, I had to take another little piggy from you to get you to do it, but in the end you came through like a champ.” A girlish giggle. “You should be proud of yourself.”

  More laughter. The mocking approval of a sadistic audience.

  And the low, pitiable wail of their prisoner.

  Then the girl was talking again. “You should see your face, Johnny. You weren’t that handsome to begin with, but now you’re one of the ugliest fuckers I’ve ever seen.”

  More of that awful, mocking laughter.

  Lashon recognized the voice of the one speaking. It was the snooty sorority girl the others had called Mercedes. Based on her experiences so far, Lashon was certain her initial impressions of this girl had been false ones. She was no sorority girl, for one thing. None of them were the college students on a weekend getaway she had taken them for in the beginning. And no way was her actual name Mercedes.

  The last deduction was confirmed a moment later when the girl exchanged a few words with a guy who referred to her as Heidi. She recognized the male voice as belonging to the strapping, athletic-looking young man who had gone by the name Rick during their initial, brief meeting in the clearing outside. But apparently that had also been an alias, for Heidi addressed him as Rob.

  They had all been engaged in a kind of playacting when she first came stumbling into their midst. Which struck her as a very odd thing for anyone to be doing out here in the middle of nowhere. Why assume make-believe roles for a likely audience of absolutely no one?

  Lashon frowned as she thought about it.

  Maybe it did make a weird kind of sense. She was currently residing inside of an alternate reality, one crafted via inexplicable means from a motion picture. These crazy assholes were maybe the mirror images of people from her world. In her world, though, those people weren’t crazy at all. They were just actors. Professionals whose lives were built upon the ability to believably create false impressions, or rather the illusion of being someone other than who they actually were. So maybe there was some brand of very strange linking correlation between the two realities.

  Maybe. And maybe not.

  And maybe she was just overthinking an admittedly intriguing question with no obvious answer while stalling for time. It was one thing to feel such anger that you felt compelled to exact bloody vengeance. It was another thing entirely to find yourself right at the precipice of that last moment of truth.

  Everything was heightened in this moment. Her heart seemed to be going a million miles an hour. Hell, a billion. The gun felt steady in her hands, more or less, but other parts of her body were trembling. She felt weak in the knees. Her breath seemed horribly loud as it went rapidly in and out. Sweat rose on her brow and slid down her temples.

  Another female voice, one she didn’t recognize, spoke up. “I’m bored, Heidi.”

  Heidi snorted. “So?”

  “So this dude’s done for. We should go get that hot chick Ashley stashed away in her room. She’ll be more fun than Jigsaw Face here.”

  A brief, possibly contemplative silence.

  Then a sigh from Heidi. “You got a point, bitch. Johnny can barely work up the strength to scream anymore.”

  Rob chuckled. “That black-haired bitch will scream plenty, I bet, especially when you start threatening to cut her titties off.”

  A laugh from Heidi. “Hell, that’ll be nothing. Wait till I actually do cut them off. She’ll be the loudest screamer we’ve had in a long time.”

  “I do love a good screamer,” the other girl said.

  “And I ain’t had fried titties for dinner in a long-ass time,” Rob added.

  Even after all she had gone through so far, Lashon’s stomach churned at that statement. Just when she thought she had plumbed the farthest depths of this band of psychos’ sickness, yet another level of unthinkable depravity was uncovered.

  “So go fetch the whore,” Heidi said, presumably addressing Rob. “I’ll open Johnny’s throat for him while you’re gone.”

  If she had been waiting for her cue, there it was.

  Now or never.

  She wheeled around and stood framed in the archway, with the gun extended in front of her in one hand and the blood-smeared butcher’s knife clasped in the other. The faces of everyone in the kitchen turned her way in the same moment. Everyone including the man Heidi had called Johnny.

  Lashon’s plan had been to start shooting right away. There was just no percentage in giving these people any time to react. But she found herself momentarily stunned into inaction at the sight of Johnny, whose hands had been nailed to a table. He was missing several fingers and the surface of the table was covered in blood. There was a scent of charred meat in the air and it was immediately apparent they had been cauterizing his wounds in order to extend his suffering.

  As awful as all that was, however, it was what had been done to his face that shocked her into temporary insensibility. His lips had been cut entirely away, leaving his teeth and gums exposed in a hideous rictus grin. Lashon felt sick. No amount of plastic surgery was ever gonna make that look right again. His bulg
ing eyes stared a silent plea at her—Kill me.

  They all stood there staring at each other for a frozen moment that seemed to go on forever. Lashon watched the expressions of the psychotic brothers and sisters slowly change from startled fright to anger as they took in her blood-soaked appearance. It appeared to hit them all in the same instant what must have happened. She had killed multiple members of their family. It was maybe the first time any of their many victims had gotten the upper hand.

  She was surprised to perceive real grief intermingled with their anger. She had believed these monsters incapable of actual human feelings unrelated to the base pleasures of sadism, but it was there all right.

  Good. Fuck them.

  The blonde girl she had heard talking to Heidi let out a shriek of rage and came charging at her from the left, wielding a frying pan raised high above her head. Hot cooking oil splashed out of the pan and traced a sizzling trail down the length of the girl’s forearm. It had to hurt, but she appeared oblivious to the pain. Little lengths of blackened meat tumbled from the pan as well.

  Fingers, Lashon thought.

  Those are Johnny’s missing fingers.

  She swung the gun to her left and squeezed the trigger. The gun jerked hard in her hand, sending an unexpected shock of pain down her arm to her shoulder. But the bullet found its target, punching a hole through the girl’s throat and staggering her backward. Lashon corrected her aim and fired again. The next round went right between the girl’s eyes. Blood erupted from the back of her head just before she fell over dead. That left three of them. Heidi and the two guys. Big Rob and the slightly built guy who had posed as the boyfriend of “Mercedes” earlier in the evening.

  “Get her!”

  Heidi’s shrill scream spurred the men into action. Both came barreling at her full speed from opposite sides of the table. No time for thinking. Action time. Lashon aimed first at Rob, instinct telling her he was the bigger threat. She dropped the knife and gripped the gun’s butt with both hands as she fired three rounds through his chest. They staggered him, but he kept coming, reaching her and falling upon her as she fired a final round up through his chin. Blood and fragments of brain and bone rained down upon her as the weight of his corpse drove her back through the archway and down to the carpeted living room floor.