The Late Night Horror Show Read online

  Ben listened to the quickly related tale with a careful expression that betrayed nothing. When she had finished bringing him up to speed, he let out a tired breath and rubbed at his eyes before saying, “Well, that is definitely some crazy shit you just told me.”

  Brix shrugged. “I told you—”

  He laughed, cutting her off. “But it ain’t any crazier than zombies overrunning the whole goddamn world. Listen…let’s say you’re not crazy at all. I mean, let’s just suppose. And if what you say is true…and if you can get into this place and somehow figure a way back to your world…what do you think the chances are of taking me back there with you?”

  Now Jason turned in his seat to look at Ben. “Slim and fucking none, brother, most likely.”

  Brix didn’t say anything at all. She suspected Jason was right, but she had no way of knowing one way or the other.

  Ben stared at the hands folded in his lap for a moment, nodding to himself as he mulled it all over. Then he looked at them, a small, fatalistic smile touching the edges of his mouth. “Back the car up.”

  Brix frowned. “What?”

  “Back the fucking car up, girl.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re rammin’ it right through the front of that fucking theater. That’s why.”

  Now Brix was smiling, too. “Right on.”

  She turned away from him and got settled behind the wheel again. She glanced at Jason. He nodded and reached for his seat belt. That struck her as a good idea, considering what they were about to attempt. She got strapped in and heard Ben doing the same in the back. Then she put the car in reverse, put the gas pedal to the floorboard, and sent the car rocketing backward halfway across the lot. There was a loud thump as the Firebird’s rear end sent the hospital gown-clad zombie sliding across pavement.

  Brix moved the gearshift to the slot marked D.

  She looked at Jason again and reached across the seat to clasp hands with him. “Sorry about wasting your girlfriend earlier.”

  Jason shook his head and clutched her hand tightly for a moment. “Sorry she wasted your boyfriend. Maybe this isn’t the right time to bring it up, but maybe if we make it through this, we could, like, go out or something.”

  She smiled and gave his hand a final squeeze. “It’s a date.”

  She faced forward again and stared at the boarded-up building. “Here we come, motherfuckers.”

  “Ready or not,” Jason chimed in.

  “Yee-haw” was Ben’s contribution from the back.

  It sounded sort of sarcastic, but in a good-humored way. Which was amazing in light of all they had been through. And in light of the overwhelming evidence of death, chaos, and destruction all around them. But Brix guessed that sometimes you had to laugh in the face of darkness in order to keep it from consuming you.

  She let out a breath.

  Tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

  And put the gas pedal all the way down again.

  Brix kept smiling, even as her body instinctively braced for impact. The theater’s boarded-up entrance loomed large within seconds. In another second the car’s wheels bounced over the curb, rocking them violently in their seats. And then they were all screaming as the car’s front end smashed through the entrance and into the darkness beyond.

  This is it, John thought. My moment of truth.

  Tears brimmed in his eyes as he started down the stairs to the garishly lit cellar below. But the tears weren’t for him or for his own life, which he knew for certain was in its last moments.

  I’m sorry, Marie.

  Sorry I killed you.

  Sorry you didn’t find a man truly worthy of you.

  Sorry for everything.

  The immense sorrow added additional fuel to his rage as he neared the bottom of the stairs. Heidi’s face was a mask of shock as she knelt over her brother’s lifeless body.

  Good.

  I hope it hurts, bitch.

  Hope it hurts like hell.

  He raised the gun and started shooting.

  Lashon was astounded by what Johnny had accomplished. The guts it took to have gotten himself this far was beyond comprehension. The man was a fucking hero. His dramatic reappearance reignited her hope for a single exhilarating moment.

  Until he started shooting.

  She couldn’t fault him for trying to take out Heidi immediately. But, thanks to his injuries, his hold on the gun was awkward at best. Heidi scampered away from him as the first few shots missed and the slugs ricocheted off the cellar’s concrete walls. One passed through the skull of the unfortunate young man in the Basket Case T-shirt, sending a spray of brains out the back of his head. Lashon did the only thing she could do with bullets bouncing around in the closed space—she curled into a tight, quivering ball and hoped no stray fragments of lead would come ripping through her flesh.

  When she opened her eyes again, Heidi was over by the shelves containing the gruesome jars of pickled body parts and shriveled organs. Johnny hobbled closer to her and tried to steady his aim for a more effective shot. Heidi reached into one of the compartments and pulled out a jar containing what looked like a brain. She raised it over her head and heaved it at him just as he finally managed to squeeze off another shot. The bullet nicked her shoulder and sent her crashing backward into the shelves.

  Unfortunately for Johnny, Heidi’s aim had been true as well. The big glass jar hit him square in the face and exploded on impact. He screamed and dropped the gun as he fell to his knees, swiping clumsily at his eyes with his mutilated hands. There were shards of glass embedded in his flesh, including a large fragment protruding from one of his eyes. He had been at least temporarily blinded.

  Heidi unleashed a scream of rage and frustration as she braced her hands against the shelves behind her. She pushed herself away from the shelves with sufficient force to cause several more jars to come crashing to the floor, where they shattered and spilled their sickening contents. Blood was leaking from the hole gouged across the top of Heidi’s shoulder, but Lashon was crushed to realize it was nothing like a fatal wound. Poor Johnny. He had tried so hard, struggled so valiantly…all for nothing.

  Lashon knew she should make a grab for the gun. But she was still too weakened and was too far away. Heidi snatched it up within seconds and started screaming again as she aimed it at Johnny’s bleeding face. The words spewing forth from her mouth were too shrill to understand. She nonetheless clearly had some choice things to tell Johnny, regardless of whether the poor bastard could understand her through her molten rage. Lashon hoped the bitch would keep up the verbal assault a while longer yet. Because though the gun was lost to her, something else was not.

  Blaine’s body had landed almost within grabbing range.

  She eyed the cleaver in the back of his head with an intensity of focus that cut cleanly through her pain. She coveted that goddamn cleaver. Wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything else. She summoned what remained of her strength and crawled closer to the body. Her hand closed around its handle just as Heidi’s screaming was reaching its apparent apex. She gave it a savage yank and it came loose with a grind of splintering bone. In the same instant, the boom of the gun resounded in the cellar again and Lashon didn’t need to see what had happened to know her hero was finally dead.

  I’ll do her for you, Johnny, she thought. I fucking promise.

  She got to her feet with a howl of pain and took a lurching step toward Heidi. A glance at Johnny’s supine form, dead on the floor—with a growing pool of blood spreading out around his head—enraged her enough to return her strength to near-normal levels. She took a steadier step toward Heidi and began to raise the cleaver.

  Heidi laughed. “Stupid bitch. You’re done for and don’t even know it.” She raised the gun again and aimed it point-blank at Lashon’s face. “Goodbye, whore.”

  She squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  Her expression of insane glee slowly faded, giving way to a frown as she
stared at the gun. But she kept it aimed at Lashon and squeezed the trigger again.

  Click.

  Click, click, click.

  “Empty.” Lashon smiled. “Used your last bullet on a blind man. Who’s the stupid bitch now, you fucking cunt?”

  Heidi dropped the gun.

  She shook her head in dismay and held her hands up. “No. Please.”

  Lashon kept smiling. “That’s right. Beg.”

  Heidi whimpered and took a step backward. “Please.”

  “Good, good. Keep it up. Maybe I’ll be merciful.”

  With her next backward step, Heidi’s foot landed on something big and slimy that might have been some poor dead bastard’s diseased liver. Her mouth opened in a big surprised O as her feet went out from under her and she went crashing to the glass-strewn floor.

  Lashon was done playing with the evil bitch. She pounced immediately, straddling her to pin her to the floor as she raised the cleaver high overhead and brought it down with every ounce of savagery she could muster. The first chop split the girl’s face open to the bone. She writhed and screamed, pain galvanizing her as she tried to buck Lashon off her body.

  But Lashon would not be budged. She brought the cleaver down again, this time slamming it into her throat. The girl’s eyes jittered in their sockets and her body twitched. Blood leaked from the corners of her mouth even as larger gouts of gore spurted from the wound in her throat.

  Lashon still wasn’t satisfied.

  She chopped at Heidi’s face and throat many more times. By the time she was done, the dead girl’s once very beautiful face was an utter, ugly ruin. Given what she had done to Johnny, this seemed only right. At last, she arrived at a moment where it felt like it was enough. Her rage had been expended. Now she just felt tired. Weary almost beyond reckoning. She tossed the cleaver aside and staggered to her feet.

  She turned in a slow circle, taking all the madness in one last time. The bodies hanging from the hooks. The hideous things that had been done to those poor people. The many jars still remaining on all those shelves. Those trophies of horror and atrocity. And, worst of all, Johnny’s poor, violated body sprawled on the cold, hard floor. She went to him and knelt by him to mutter a few words of sincere gratitude for all he had sacrificed.

  Then she got up and walked out of there.

  She emerged from the house and stood for a time on the long porch, wondering what her next move should be as she watched the first rays of the sun already peeking over the horizon grow brighter. The cooler she remembered from earlier was still propped atop a table in the middle of the porch. She flipped open its top and saw a few cans of beer still floating in cool water. She plucked one out, shook off the excess moisture, and popped the tab.

  “Here’s to you, Johnny,” she said, with a slight tilt of the can.

  Somewhere a bird twittered prettily. The sound made Lashon smile. There was still beauty in the world, after all. Nothing could ever erase that, including any amount of horror.

  Nothing.

  She stayed there a while longer, drinking and thinking.

  The man who called himself Doctor Ominous was no longer doing his impression of a jolly, delightfully mad evil genius. If anything, his expression betrayed an unexpected shade of sadness as he stared at the corpse slumped in the chair opposite his desk. Greg Nelson had been right, of course. The game had been rigged from the start. Ominous had known precisely how many clicks of the revolver’s trigger would spin the cylinder around to the single live round it contained.

  O’Dell cleared his throat. “A-hem. Should I, uh…dispose of the remains?”

  Ominous steepled his fingers and kept his eyes on the face of the man who had dared to challenge him. His hands were hanging slack by his sides, but the gun was still wedged inside his mouth. There was a messy spray of blood and brains decorating the middle of the control room, which now no longer resembled the interior of an old-timey train coach. Rarely in his life had the doctor witnessed displays of courage on this level. It was a thing to be admired, no doubt. And yet what had his courage earned the young man? Nothing. Not a damn thing at all.

  A shame.

  Empathy was an emotion Ominous rarely experienced. He didn’t much give a damn about other human beings. Never had. So it was curious he should feel empathy now, even in light of Greg Nelson’s admirable sacrifice.

  And yet…he did.

  “Doctor?”

  Ominous blinked and gave his head a shake to clear the mental cobwebs. He looked at O’Dell, whose illusory leprechaun appearance was no more. In truth, O’Dell was fair-skinned and stood a few inches taller than six feet. It had amused Ominous very much to craft an illusion so far removed from the man’s reality.

  He waved a hand at the dead man. “By all means, dispose of the body. But…” He trailed off, chewing on his bottom lip as he began to entertain a concept so foreign he could scarcely credit it as originating from his own brain. And yet here it was.

  “Before you do that…” He waved his hand again, this time indicating the screens on the wall. “Reset the continuum. Bring them all back.”

  O’Dell’s expression betrayed genuine surprise for a fraction of a second. Then he was all business again. “Of course, doctor. Many of them are dead already, of course.”

  Ominous nodded and drummed the tips of his fingers together as he began to swivel back and forth in his chair. “Of course. But bring back the ones still living. And…”

  He stopped swiveling and trailed off again.

  O’Dell cleared his throat, prompting him. “Yes, doctor?”

  “I imagine we could access a plane of existence where another version of Greg Nelson yet lives.”

  “Probably.”

  “A variation on this world where the difference is so slight as to be negligible.”

  O’Dell nodded. “You already know you can do that, doctor.”

  Ominous snapped his fingers and sat forward, suddenly more buoyant than he had been at any point since the last moments prior to this Greg Nelson’s demise. “And that is precisely what we shall do! We will bring another Greg Nelson here, dropping him smoothly into the life formerly occupied by this Greg Nelson!”

  “Right. Um…” O’Dell cleared his throat again, a touch more nervously this time. “To what end, sir?”

  Ominous smiled. “I’m feeling magnanimous, O’Dell. A version of Greg Nelson will have a chance to reconnect with his girl. We’ll even tamper with the replacement’s brain a bit, allow him to believe he experienced what this Greg Nelson experienced tonight.” His grin broadened as he warmed to the idea. “Albeit with an alternative outcome.”

  The alternative concept that had been niggling at his brain was…mercy.

  So truly foreign and strange a thing.

  And yet…not without its small pleasures.

  He began to rock in his chair again as the Mix of Diabolical Awesomeness shifted to a new song, “Death Comes Ripping” by the Misfits.

  The music moved him. It always did.

  Stirred the beast, as he’d told Greg Nelson.

  He got up and danced around the room, slipping and sliding in the blood and gore.

  Out of the darkness and into the light…

  Darkness gave way to blinding light as the Firebird blew through the theater’s entrance and passed through what seemed like empty space for a moment—a moment during which consciousness faded and the fabric of reality itself ceased to exist. Then the world coalesced around them again and the car was hurtling through a wide-open white room that bore a passing resemblance to a movie theater lobby. Then the Firebird slammed into an obstruction that had once masqueraded as a movie theater concessions stand and ground to an abrupt halt.

  Still rattled by the crash through the theater’s entrance, the three of them looked around at their strange surroundings in dumbstruck wonder.

  Then Jason said, “Goddamn. This is like some space odyssey bullshit up in here.”

  Ben leaned forward to poke his
head between seats. “Please tell me the rest of your world doesn’t look like this.”

  Brix shook her head. “I’m not sure this is our world.”

  Jason turned fully around in his seat and frowned at something.

  Brix followed his gaze, shifting around in her seat, too. “Okay. That’s strange.”

  Ben took a look as well. “Could someone explain that to me?”

  Brix shook her head. “Nope. Not me.”

  Jason grunted. “Me, either.”

  Though there were signs of damage caused by the Firebird’s careening path through the lobby, the theater’s entrance was intact. But Brix remembered the explosion of glass and wood planks as the front end of the car had gone crashing through. Still, it was impossible to deny the evidence before her eyes.

  Then it hit her.

  The crash had occurred somewhere else. In that other world.

  And this thing that had disguised itself as an ordinary-appearing theater was somehow the facilitator. This white austerity surrounding them was the truth beneath the surface, along with its hints of an otherworldly, incomprehensible reality-warping technology.

  Brix said, “Guys, I’ve got a great idea.”

  Jason looked at her. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Brix tried to start the car, thinking she’d just get it turned around and go crashing through the entrance again. But the engine wouldn’t turn over.

  Brix smacked the steering wheel. “Fuck it. Abandon ship.”

  They bailed out and commenced a mad dash for the theater’s front doors. Which, astonishingly, were unlocked and yielded easily to their touch.

  One moment, they were embracing in the rear compartment of the helicopter as the bird flew off into the deep darkness of the night. Then, a bright flash obliterated the darkness and the next thing they knew they were in the parking lot outside the theater where the whole nightmarish evening had begun.