The Late Night Horror Show Page 29
Monroe recognized at once that they really were back in their own world. And yet things hadn’t simply been reset. He saw other people wandering about the parking lot in a daze. A few of them he recognized from his brief time inside the theater. Strangers who had stood in line with them for tickets and popcorn. Some of them looked like they were in shock. Some were crying. Some were covered in blood. Kira was still wrapped in his arms. Like many of the others, she was blood-drenched.
She was also nude.
She shivered in his arms as she nervously scanned the surroundings. Then she looked at Monroe. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
He nodded. “I know. You can wear my shirt. It’ll be something at least.”
“That’s not what I mean. Look.” She jerked her head in the direction of the brightening horizon. “The sun’s coming up. And we’re still…”
Monroe was confused for a moment.
Then awareness dawned.
Shit. She’s right.
“We’re still vampires.”
It was true.
Everything that had happened over in that other world actually had happened. They had become vampires there and so they still were here.
Kira clutched at his shirt. “I don’t want to burn. I don’t want to die, Monroe.”
“We’re not gonna burn. I promise.”
There had to be a car somewhere nearby they could steal. Kira’s car was here, but it was useless for now, as her keys were still back in that other world. So Monroe scanned the parking lot again, searching for a likely victim. After a moment, he spied someone perfect, a very woozy-looking middle-aged man in a ragged-looking T-shirt attempting to open his crappy Dodge Neon.
He took Kira by the hand and led her in that direction.
“Come on,” he told her. “We’ll catch a ride to my place and have a drink along the way.”
She smiled at this and clutched his hand tighter.
“This will be fun,” she said, almost cheerily. “We’re probably the only real vampires in this world. There probably aren’t even any hunters to worry about.”
Monroe thought she was probably right. This would be fun. The future suddenly seemed very bright indeed. Or, he reflected with a smile, as bright as it could for creatures who would have to spend the remainder of their very long undead existences living under the cover of the night.
Most of the Late Night Horror Show survivors had already wandered off by the time Lashon rematerialized in the parking lot outside the theater. Though she would never realize it, there had been a slight delay in her return to her proper world. A delay necessitated by certain arrangements that had to be made.
There was just one other person there to commiserate with upon her return, a slightly plump woman in her thirties who claimed to have survived a wild night of being chased around by flesh-eating zombies. Lashon had no reason to doubt the tale. She and the woman wound up being the only two witnesses to the ultimate fate of the Sunshine 6 cineplex. Or, rather, what appeared to be its fate.
The woman frowned as she puffed on a cigarette. Lashon thought it odd she’d somehow held on to her smokes through a zombie apocalypse, but she guessed she’d seen stranger things over the course of the last dozen hours.
She realized she sort of wouldn’t mind a smoke herself and said so. “What is it? Something wrong? Something else, I mean.”
The woman tapped a cigarette from a nearly empty pack and passed it to Lashon. “The theater…” She nodded in its direction. “Is it sort of…glowing?”
Lashon turned to look at the building.
It wasn’t glowing. Not exactly.
No.
It was…shimmering. Turning translucent. Fading in and out of existence. Or just turning invisible. Or just going somewhere else. Somehow.
And then it was gone.
The two women stood there a while longer, puffing on their cigarettes and staring at the empty space formerly occupied by some kind of alien thing or other that had pretended to be a movie theater.
Then the plump woman flicked her cigarette butt away. “Well. There’s something you don’t see every day.”
Lashon nodded. “You’re right about that. Your car here by any chance?”
“Yep.”
“Reckon you could give a girl a ride?”
“Sure.”
The woman drove Lashon back to her apartment building. They exchanged very few words along the way. Though they had shared similar experiences, no mystical bond of any type arose as a result of their journeys through nightmarish other worlds. Instead, there was an unspoken but understood mutual desire to forget any of it had ever happened. The woman dropped her off at the curb outside her building and drove away without another word.
Lashon started toward the building, but came to a sudden stop when she spied Greg Nelson sitting on a bench outside the front door. She was immediately apprehensive, but then he smiled and waved when he caught her eye.
A wild stew of emotions churned inside her at the sight of that smile. He wasn’t a bad guy. Never had been. He just hadn’t known when to back off and leave her alone. And there was the issue of what she had done to him. Which was not good. Not good at all. Seeing him now triggered fresh pangs of remorse.
He seemed so happy to see her. She had assumed their relationship was dead forever, but was it possible there was still hope?
Well.
There was only one way to find out.
He stood and waited right there for her as she went to meet him.
About the Author
Bryan Smith is the author of numerous previous novels and novellas, including House of Blood, Depraved, The Killing Kind, The Dark Ones, The Diabolical Conspiracy, and The Freakshow. Bryan lives in Tennessee with an array of animals. He enjoys beer, loud rock and roll, bad B movies, Britcoms, and a lot more of the usual kind of stuff. Visit his home on the web at www.bryansmith.info.
Look for these titles by Bryan Smith
Coming Soon:
Go Kill Crazy!
Come home to the darkness.
The Fall of Never
© 2004 Ronald Malfi
Kelly Rich, long estranged from her family, is forced to return home when her sister is involved in a mysterious accident. After years of suppressing the events that drove her away, she must struggle to unlock the mystery of her past in order to save her sister. But nothing is as it seems in her foreboding ancestral home, where cold hearts rule the hearth and deadly secrets lurk in the forest. Plunged back into the dream world of her youth, Kelly will have to face the dark reality of her own role in the horrors afflicting her family.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Fall of Never:
In the darkness, shivering, she ran.
—someone let the baby out someone let the baby out someone let the baby out someone—
She burst through clawed tree branches, her body wracked and sweating, her bare feet raw and bleeding from the frozen earth. Her heartbeat pulsed just beneath the surface of her face; her throat burned with each wheezing breath. And for a moment she thought she would faint. Around her, the darkness became blindness…and the floating orb of the moon, wide and faceless beyond the sprawling canopy of bare trees, blurred and smeared, double, trebled, augmented to a greasy horizontal smudge. Only now, thrust into a wooded clearing, was she able to pause and catch her breath, and to wipe her eyes. Runaway tears had frozen the sides of her face, her temples.
—someone let—
She heard a branch snap behind her. Uttered a breathless scream. Turning, she could see nothing, and could only feel her pulse throbbing inside her head and through her arms and legs, rushing the blood, warfare-like, through her body. Was she breathing? She couldn’t breathe. Was she dreaming? She couldn’t tell for certain…
Another cracking branch, like bone: closer.
No!
Something shifted in the darkness ahead of her. Its proximity paralyzed her.
No…
Pressing her eyes tight, she willed herself
away from this place, turning, turning, and called out for her sister, her sister, her—
She could hear him breathing—too close now.
She turned to run, her eyes still shut tight, the fingerlike tree limbs probing and cutting and clawing at her. Her mind summoned images of running brook water, of forested hillsides crested with snow…of the shape, shifting, materializing, fiendishly childlike…of her sister warning her to write it down, write it down, and not to forget it, any of it…
Her legs pumping, she ran. Her heart nearly bursting through her chest, she ran, and she found she could not stop, and though she was running, she was not going anywhere. She was running underwater; she was running in a dream.
A dream…
And she awoke. And she opened her eyes. And she was there, in bed, safe, warm. But afraid.
Because you are here. Because you are right here.
And she was.
And she was.
She screamed. She could not will herself back to bed, could not pull her solid form from this black woods and tuck herself back, back…could not force herself to believe she was not here.
A frozen hand fell on the back of her neck. She stumbled and fell face first to the forest floor. The side of her head struck something hard and unforgiving, and her vision briefly flickered. She dug her fingers into the soil but could not rise, could not move. Behind her, someone shifted, moved. She could hear breathing aside from her own.
“No,” she whispered. It took all her remaining strength just to get it out. “No…please…”
“Please,” a voice hissed from behind her. Very close.
“Please,” she managed again, breaking the word into hitching sobs just before the tears came. She could not think, could not move, and she felt herself falling deeper and deeper inside her own head: here, in my bed, in my room, safe, warm, here, here, here here here here, please God put me back in my room and not here here here—
The shape moved around her. She could hear footsteps crunching the dead, frost-covered leaves. And before her mind shut down, she was vaguely aware of long, icy fingers brushing back her sweaty hair.
“Pretty,” said the voice.
The Late Night Horror Show
Bryan Smith
When the movie starts, the horror becomes real.
It was a run-down old multi-plex in a seedy part of town. But it had a special late-night festival of the cheap horror movies one group of friends loved, movies filled with zombies, vampires and backwoods maniacs.
How could they know it was a very special screening indeed? After the friends split up and their chosen movies began, they found themselves transported out of the life they knew and into the blood-drenched worlds of the films. Worlds where the living dead roam the countryside, the decrepit mansion of a vampire and his minions dominates the night sky, and the shrill scream of a buzz saw is always right behind you.
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
The Late Night Horror Show
Copyright © 2013 by Bryan Smith
ISBN: 978-1-61921-181-0
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: March 2013
www.samhainpublishing.com
Table of Contents
Dedication
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
First Intermission
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Second Intermission
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Third Intermission
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Final Intermission
Part Three
About the Author
Look for these titles by Bryan Smith
Also Available from Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Copyright Page