The Late Night Horror Show Page 5

  “The hell with this.”

  It was time to swallow her pride and get out of here. She still had just enough time to get to the theater showing Blood Lust before the final trailer ended. She wouldn’t even have to bother or intrude on Kira and Monroe. She could maybe sit a few seats down from them. Close enough to her friend that she didn’t feel so alone, while still allowing her some space. She grabbed her purse, stood up, and smoothed out her skirt. She made her way down the row of seats to the aisle. The half-dozen other people in the theater all turned their heads to look at her. It made her skin crawl. She was the only girl seeing this flick. She felt a distinct sense of unease as she reached the aisle and started toward the door, doing her best to hurry along without seeming panicked.

  She reached the door and grasped the handle.

  She pulled on it. It didn’t budge.

  “What the fuck?”

  She pulled again. Same result. She peered through the narrow vertical window inset at the edge of the door and saw one of the strange theater employees staring in her direction. She pounded the base of a fist against the door, rattling it in its frame. Someone in the theater made a shushing noise. She ignored this and banged her fist against the door again. The employee tugged at his bow tie and came closer. He was grinning.

  “Hey, asshole!” She pitched her voice as loud as she could and banged on the door yet again. “Open this fucking door! It’s locked!”

  He came closer still, almost right up to the door, but he made no move to open or unlock it. He was still grinning. Lashon’s heart hammered as she realized the expression had a mocking quality to it.

  I see you in there, the expression said. And you are not getting out, no matter how much you scream and shout.

  People in the auditorium were hissing at her and telling her to sit down and shut up.

  The man in the bow tie was laughing now.

  Lashon’s sense of panic and exasperation gave way to genuine fear.

  What the hell is happening here?

  Lashon turned away from the door and raced down the aisle to the bottom of the auditorium, where she veered right and headed straight for the emergency exit. Which was also locked and would not budge, no matter how hard she threw herself against it.

  A burly man near the front of the theater came out of his seat and approached. The expression on his puffy face was a mixture of agitation and concern. “Lady, what the hell is wrong with you? Are you having some kind of fit?”

  Lashon reeled away from him and lifted her face toward the screen.

  The trailers were over.

  The movie was starting.

  The man came after her. “Hey, calm down. Do you need help?”

  Lashon sobbed and dropped to her knees. “We’re trapped.” She said it over and over, the anguish in her voice rising every time. “We’re trapped. We’re trapped.”

  On the screen, a metal door banged open and light spilled into a darkened hallway. A man wearing a mask stepped through the opening. In his hands was a big chainsaw, buzzing at high rev. Lashon stood and backed away from the screen as the masked man started down the hallway.

  She felt a hand at her back.

  Heard a voice in her ear, a low, throaty tone.

  She opened her mouth to scream.

  By the time the final trailer was over, Monroe was at peace with missing the chance to catch the zombie movie with his old friend. Kira’s body felt so warm and soft beneath the arm he’d draped around her shoulders. She had kissed him once already. Which had made him realize how much he’d been repressing his true feelings for her. Being her friend was nice. He’d derived a not insignificant degree of fulfillment just from that. She was the only truly close female friend he had. She’d shown him different ways of looking at things, viewpoints he didn’t get from his male acquaintances. And yet, some hidden part of him clearly had always desired more, something deeper.

  The movie was starting. He could tell by the sudden swell of ominous music. But he couldn’t bring himself to watch the screen. He was entranced by Kira. Everything about her suddenly seemed so perfect. The soft, round shape of her face. The small nose. The slightly plump lips. Eyes so big he could imagine falling into them.

  She sensed his scrutiny and looked at him.

  There was a long moment of electric tension. Nothing was said, but much was communicated in that shared gaze.

  Kira set the popcorn bucket on the sticky floor, then she seized a handful of his shirt and pulled him toward her.

  Monroe kissed her.

  Slid a hand up one of her bare thighs.

  And then there was an abrupt crash of amplified thunder. Monroe jumped. There was a flash of bright light. Lightning? That had to be it. It was storming in the movie. The movie he didn’t give a shit about right now, a sentiment apparently shared by Kira. She gripped the hand on her thigh and urged it farther up her leg.

  She moaned softly, whispered his name. It was a delicious thing to hear from her lips.

  There was another bright flash.

  And then another, brighter now, almost blinding. Monroe blinked and felt suddenly woozy. His head felt thick, his body distant, his thoughts fuzzy. The light flared brighter still, blotting out the world. For a long moment, he seemed to exist only in a sightless, soundless void, a place of pure white. He couldn’t even see his own body. A thought drifted out of the formless ether. He had died. Some sort of sudden attack. This was the afterlife.

  The moment passed.

  He heard another huge crash of thunder.

  Then he felt rain pattering on his head.

  He opened his eyes. Opened his mouth. Felt water touch his tongue. He was lying flat on his back on asphalt. He could feel its rough texture beneath him. He stared up at the sky, at the black clouds drifting high above him, moving fast and occasionally obscuring a luminous full moon.

  He sat up, took a look around.

  “What the fuck?”

  He was in the parking lot outside the theater. He got to his feet and staggered around in a slow circle. The Sunshine 6 was dark. There were no movie titles on the white marquee. The only vehicle in sight was Kira’s silver Hyundai. Every other car, Jason’s Malibu included, had vanished.

  His first thought was of Jason Tatum.

  Motherfucker put something extra in the punch. Acid or some shit.

  How else to explain this?

  He heard the sound of an engine approaching. A huge vehicle of some sort came screeching into the parking lot. Its bright headlights pinned him as it rocketed toward him. He held up his hands against the glare and was able to discern the huge outline of a Hummer. It squealed to a stop six feet away and doors on both sides popped open. Two musclebound men clad all in black emerged.

  One pointed at him. “Get him.”

  Monroe gaped at them. “Whoa. Hey. Just hold the fuck on. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but—”

  Both men came at him.

  Monroe belatedly realized that full-throttle retreat was by far his best option. He staggered backward a few steps, then turned to flee at full speed, but by then they had him. He struggled against them, but they held on to him with grips of iron. One of the men opened the Hummer’s back door and tossed him inside.

  Kira was there.

  A man with the coldest, blackest eyes he’d ever seen was seated next to her.

  Kira whimpered, her eyes bulging with fear. As Monroe watched in stunned helplessness, the man opened his mouth, displaying elongated incisors. Fangs…my God, those are fucking fangs. An animal rumble issued from the man’s throat. Then his head snapped toward Kira’s throat, his fangs ripping into the tender, exposed flesh.

  Monroe felt nausea at the sight of the suddenly spurting blood.

  Kira’s blood.

  He felt lightheaded again. He pitched sideways in the seat, unconscious.

  The door wouldn’t open.

  Greg frowned and tried it again.

  Same result.

  Lashon wasn�
�t here. He couldn’t understand it. He tried to think. Kira’s Hyundai was outside. That was undeniable. So she was here. But perhaps Lashon had changed her mind about coming. Maybe she’d opted to mope around her apartment again instead. It was what she did most days.

  Then again…

  There was one other possibility. He knew from Lashon’s blog that Kira was seeing the vampire movie first. Perhaps she had decided to stick with her friend and see that one. The prospect of searching another auditorium didn’t excite him. Yet he felt he had to do it.

  But this situation with the door was getting in the way.

  He reached for the handle again, but this time his hand fell limply upon it and slid slowly off the slick metal. He felt woozy and screwed his eyes tightly shut in time to miss that first flash of blinding white light. When he opened them again, the auditorium doors were still right in front of him, but something was different. He felt sick. Nauseated. But his curiosity overrode these physical symptoms a moment longer. Long enough to peer through the door’s vertical window.

  The lobby was dark.

  Completely dark.

  He could make out a dim outline of the concessions stand and a portion of the ticket booth. And something was moving out there. A man. Probably one of the weird theater employees. But even this person was just a vague outline, a form that was becoming dimmer with each passing second. Wow. That was just really strange. It was almost as if the world outside the auditorium was…

  …fading away.

  The world grew fuzzier as he staggered backward down the aisle. So strange. He felt almost high. Stoned. Like he was floating away on a silky-soft white cloud.

  There was yet another flash.

  And then he felt nothing at all.

  For a while.

  The first flash of white vaguely troubled Brix. It seemed to originate from nowhere and wasn’t a part of what was unfolding on the screen. The movie was just beginning and what was happening there was happening in near-total darkness. And she had never been to a theater where the house lights would produce that kind of sudden, blinding flash. Given the absence of any logical external source of the light, this left the possibility that it had been triggered by something internal. Something in her brain. Synapses misfiring. That was scary as hell, but when she glanced at Trevor she saw him staring blankly up at the screen, his face twisted in an expression of confusion and worry she suspected mirrored her own.

  Her body tensed and all her senses went on full alert. She had shifted into fight mode without even thinking about it. It was the way she’d taught herself to react and it was second nature by now. She had long believed an apocalyptic event of some nature was just around the corner and that it was every right-thinking person’s duty to prepare themselves for survival in a world gone wrong. She had no evidence to indicate anything of the sort was happening now, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t. She thought of her Glock, shut away now in the glove compartment of the F-150. Never in her life had she more wanted to feel its reassuring weight in the palm of her hand.

  Trevor looked at her. Opened his mouth to say something.

  And that was when the second flash came.

  Someone screamed.

  As the second flash passed, Brix became aware of a deep wooziness. She also felt mildly sick. Jesus, something was really fucked and wrong about that flashing light.

  Need my gun. Got to go…get it…

  She tried to stand.

  Then the flashing light blinded her again and the world went away for a little while.

  Part Two

  Feature Presentations

  Chapter Seven

  But not for long.

  Brix also woke up flat on her back in the parking lot outside the theater. But this was not the same version of the parking lot in which Kira and Monroe found themselves after the bright flashes that interrupted the screening of Blood Lust. Here it was not raining and there were no vampire predators prowling the area in enormous automobiles.

  But that didn’t mean danger wasn’t present.

  She heard something strange. A kind of…groaning.

  Was it Trevor? Was he hurt?

  Brix’s eyes snapped open. She saw the dark sky above and knew at once this was no dream or hallucination. Somehow those bright flashes in the theater were connected to her inexplicable relocation to the parking lot. She knew intuitively no one had carried her out here. What had happened was more akin to teleportation. Which was the kind of thing you saw all the time in cheesy science fiction movies, but, so far as she knew, teleportation technology did not actually exist. Or if it did, it was the kind of ultratop-secret Area 51 thing few people knew about. And the government sure as shit would never deploy the technology in a dinky theater in a nowhere town showing cheap-ass horror movies. Unless…

  The groaning sound came again.

  What the fuck was that?

  She knew she should get up and check that out. She should also get a fix on Trevor’s location pronto. And she meant to do those things in just a second. But the troubling thought that had flashed through her mind wouldn’t go away. Because maybe a nowhere town was exactly the kind of place government black-ops types might decide to conduct risky experiments with potentially hazardous and unpredictable new types of technology and/or weaponry systems.

  Shit.

  “Brix?”

  Trevor!

  Brix was up and on her feet in the next instant. She had already locked on the direction of Trevor’s voice and was turning that way when she froze and stared off into the distance. It was nighttime in Murfreesboro. The college town was no Manhattan, but it was a metropolis compared to where she lived. It was big enough that she should see a sea of electric lights in any direction. There was light in the distance, random flickers here and there punctuating the darkness, but the source of it was not provided by the power company.

  Those were fires burning in the distance.

  Fucking fires.

  Brix gaped at the twisting columns of flame for a long moment.

  Holy shit. What the fuck?

  “Brix!”

  Trevor again, sounding panicked this time.

  And then a scream.

  Brix gave herself a mental slap.

  Get your head in the game, bitch!

  She completed the turn toward the sound of Trevor’s voice and got moving. She saw him on the ground some twenty yards from her. It was especially dark in that corner of the parking lot, but she could see that her boyfriend was scooting rapidly backward, desperately trying to get away from a shadowy figure that had emerged from behind a black SUV. The figure took another lurching step toward Trevor, drawing close enough that she could see he was a man attired in a ragged black suit. His hair was a mess and his face looked haggard in the pale moonlight. Some drunk asshole. She wasn’t sure yet why Trevor should be so afraid of someone like that, but he was afraid and that was all she needed to know.

  This was one lousy drunk who was about to get his ass handed to him.

  Hard.

  By a girl.

  That last bit was a point she always relished driving home after dealing with pukes like this. Some people were just in especially dire need of having their egos squashed. Mostly bullies and fake hard-asses. She considered it a public service, like holding doors for people or helping old ladies across the street. Brix moved past Trevor just as he was finally getting to his feet. He clutched at her as she went by, his fingers sliding off the sleeve of her denim jacket. “Brix! Don’t! Stay away from him.”

  “Don’t worry, baby. I’ve got this.”

  A scream came again. The timbre of it was the same as the previous scream. It had a distinctly feminine quality to it. And now someone else was yelling. A guy. She heard terror in that voice. But she kept her focus on the task at hand. One crisis at a time. She would help those people as soon as she’d dealt with this dumb asshole.

  She was very close to him now, mere yards away.

  He took another lurching step
in her direction.

  And…groaned.

  Brix frowned, faltering just the slightest bit.

  Um…

  Yet another lurching step. And now the smell assailed her. How had she not noticed it in the first place? The stench was so foul it made her eyes water. He smelled like a pile of rotting meat left out in the sun all day.

  Another staggering step closer.

  Almost within kicking distance.

  She was maybe letting him get a little too close, closer than she normally would when squaring off for a fight with someone, though she wasn’t overly worried. His gait and his lopsided stance were strong indicators he would be dead meat the moment she went into attack mode. There was a remote chance he was faking her out, but she doubted it. Bottom line, she didn’t perceive this clown as a real threat. And yet, something was very wrong with him. Her curiosity was piqued.

  She wrinkled her nose and scowled at him. “Dude. What the fuck? You smell like you slept in a fucking sewer.”

  The man’s mouth hung open. It opened marginally wider still and another low groan emerged.

  “What was that? Sorry, I don’t speak stupid. Try English, okay?”

  Another groan, louder this time.

  He lifted a hand, reaching for her. Brix took an instinctive step backward. She didn’t like that. Not at all. It went against everything she believed. Backing down made you look weak. That was a lesson her father had instilled in her at an early age.

  Trevor yelled at her again. “Get away from him! Jesus, Brix!”

  Another of those instinctive backward steps.

  Dammit.

  She heard sounds of violence nearby. Heavy thuds. More screams and more yelling. That Nikki chick and her ass-hat boyfriend, she was pretty sure. Obviously, Stinky here wasn’t the only threat in the vicinity. The reality of how much trouble they were potentially in hit home again. Yes, something immensely strange had happened in the theater. But something even stranger was happening out here in the parking lot. She needed to stop trying to figure this guy out. There were bigger mysteries that needed solving.