by Rysa Walker
The questions are making his head hurt, so he pushes them aside. He’ll just go check. Marty probably decided that crashing in the holding cell would be more comfortable than sleeping at the desk. But he’s going to burn the damn place down with all of these candles.
Where the hell did they come from, anyway? There isn’t a store within a thirty-mile radius that could handle this kind of order. Dozens of the damn things. It must have taken Marty a half hour to light them.
The staircase is warmer than the office, partly due to so many lit candles in the narrow space. Beads of perspiration pop up on Tucker’s forehead, and he feels the first warning of panic begin to worm its way up through his gut.
He pauses on the landing and stares down into the basement, where only flame shadows are moving, deciding not to call out again. If Marty was going to answer, he would have done so by now. And if there’s anyone else down there, it would be best not to let them know he’s coming—although yelling when he was upstairs has no doubt tipped his hand in that regard.
Tucker takes the stairs slowly, setting each foot down carefully so his boots make as little sound as possible on the steel plates. The smoke triggers a cough at the back of his throat, and he fights to keep it back.
When he reaches the cement floor at the bottom, something crunches beneath his feet. Glass. The ground is peppered with it, and he grinds a few more pieces under his heel as he turns toward the two holding cells that take up the entire left side of the basement.
A figure is hunched in the dark corner of one cell, just beyond the reach of the candlelight. Tucker squints to get a clearer look and is able to make out khaki pants.
“Marty?”
The figure stands up, and the sound of cracking joints and popping bones mingles with the sound of crunching glass as Tucker takes a step back. He starts to draw his gun to fire at the shadow but stops himself.
It’s Marty. Does he really want to shoot the only officer he has right now?
“What the fuck, Marty?” Tucker says, keeping his voice as level as possible. “What happened to the lights?”
The man doesn’t answer, but he does turn around. His face is still shrouded in darkness, but two red eyes stare back at Tucker, who is momentarily relieved to see that the eyes aren’t white. But red’s not so good either, especially given that the cell door is partially opened. He doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with Marty, but he’d feel a lot safer if he were locked in.
Tucker judges the distance and figures his odds are about fifty-fifty of reaching the door first. He takes a tentative step forward. The creature mirrors his action, almost as if it’s taunting him.
At least now he can see the face. If he’d had any doubt it was Marty, or at least that it used to be Marty, that’s dispelled by the word Martin on the name tag.
But he can now see that it’s also not Marty. Marty’s usually tanned face is deathly pale, except for large bruise-like patches that circle his red eyes. He stares at Tucker without blinking. Without moving. Then the corner of his mouth twitches. Marty pulls his lips into something that’s more snarl than smile, revealing blistered and blackened gums and two long fangs that protrude at either side of his mouth.
Vampire. Not the sparkly Edward Cullen variety, either. Old school. Nosferatu, like in the film clip at the Hart tonight.
Marty’s hands have changed, too, replaced by longer fingers. Much longer, more like claws now, and one of those claws is wrapped around a headless—and apparently bloodless—rat.
Hey, Blanche, you know we got rats in the cellar?
Tucker fights back a wave of nausea, worsened by the fact that the cell door appears to be getting farther and farther away. The bars stretch out to his right, a seemingly endless line of steel and flickering shadows. It feels like he’s inside the mirror maze at a carnival.
Marty snarls again, and Tucker decides it’s now or never. The door trembles in his vision, and he holds one arm out, ready to slam it home as soon as he feels the bars in his hand.
A rush of wind on his left carries the putrid smell of long-dead flesh, as the vampire zips past, reaching the door a second before Tucker. The metal bars fly outward, catching Tucker in the face and knocking him flat on the concrete.
Tucker gets back up and lurches toward the stairs. His feet slip, sending him crashing to his knees. He tries again and manages to hook his fingers into the metal grill of the lowest stair just as Marty’s icy claws close around his leg. A cold so deep that it burns runs through his body, but he focuses on the candle on the bottom step, which is almost within reach.
Tucker kicks into the vampire as his hand closes around the candle. Swinging his arm backward, he shoves the flame into Marty’s face, catching him perfectly in the mouth. Marty howls, releasing Tucker’s leg to clutch his singed cheek.
Tucker grabs another candle and throws it backward without looking. He scrambles up the stairs, scattering candles in his wake like a bowling ball crashing through pins.
Just as Tucker’s feet hit the landing, the creature’s hands grasp his shoulders from behind. The thing is strong—far stronger than the human version of Marty. It lifts him off the floor, squeezing his arms backward toward his spine so hard that Tucker is afraid his bones will break.
Then, with a foul-smelling hiss, the vampire hurls him across the room. Flickering lights blur past, and he lands on top of a desk. The cheap wood buckles under his weight. It pitches sideways, neatly snapping both legs on the right side, and dumps Tucker to the floor.
Candles blink out one by one, leaving the station in almost total darkness. Those red eyes probably see just fine in the dark, but Tucker is struggling as he tries to pick out the vampire’s location.
A braying laugh comes from behind him.
Aside from a superficial resemblance, the thing he saw back there doesn’t really look much like Marty. It smells far worse than Marty, and it’s about ten times as strong. The laugh, though? The laugh is 100% Marty.
Tucker reaches for his gun again, quite certain that he could now pull the trigger. But he’s seen too many movies and read too many books to believe for one moment that a bullet is going to stop this thing. He’d be better off running. He drops his hand to the floor, getting ready to push himself up and bolt for the door.
His fingers brush against a chunk of wood from one of the desk drawers, and he halts. The piece under his hand won’t work as a weapon, but one of the desk legs just might. Tucker feels around frantically until his hand closes around the makeshift stake. It’s not sharpened to a perfect point, but it’s jagged and sturdy.
Straight through the heart. He’s seen this a million times in movies and in countless episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Can’t be that hard.
Tucker pulls the desk leg toward him and waits, scared to even blink for fear of missing his chance. Keeping his breath as shallow as possible, he listens for movement in the silent station.
It’s possible that the thing left. Went back down into the basement to fetch its rat snack. Or maybe it simply vanished like the ant in the theater.
But is he willing to test that theory? Absolutely not.
So he waits, gripping the stake so hard that his hand cramps. He repositions it, causing a splinter to jam deep into his palm.
Deep enough to draw blood.
Tucker bites back a cry of pain. But it doesn’t matter. If the tiny sound didn’t give him away, the smell of blood did. He hears a sigh of anticipation, and the vampire appears seemingly out of nowhere. Maybe literally out of nowhere, because Tucker didn’t see any movement. One second the space in front of him is empty, and the next it’s filled with red eyes and fangs.
As the Marty-thing tilts his head sideways to move in toward his neck, Tucker jabs the shard of wood into its chest.
The vampire falls toward him, and Tucker pulls back to stab him again. But there’s no need. A split second later, Marty vanishes into a puff of gray ash.
Exactly like the vampires on Buffy.
&n
bsp; Exactly.
Tucker hears a faint trill of music. Not from the TV show. More like…victory music. He whips his head around, looking for the source, but there’s no movement.
The stake that killed Marty is now nothing more than a jagged piece of broken furniture, clutched in Tucker’s no-longer-bleeding hand.
That seems like an important point, but Tucker’s brain is too exhausted to explore it right now. Coughing, he stumbles toward the two glass doors leading to the moonlit parking lot. For a moment, they look like two white eyes, but then the smoke shifts, and they’re just doors again.
When he reaches the exit, Tucker pushes on the bar, certain it will be locked. Certain that he’ll look over his shoulder and see an entire army of Marty-things coming at him. But the bar gives way, and he tumbles out onto the pavement.
The air is blessedly cool against his face. He pulls in deep breaths, both to clear the smoke from his lungs and to steady his pulse. When he can breathe normally again, he realizes he’s still holding the shard of wood.
Tucker considers tossing the stake aside, but he grips it tighter instead.
Might be a good idea to hold on to the thing for a bit.
Three
DAISY
She glances down at her phone again. Zero bars. No messages. And it’s now thirty-seven minutes since her sister said she was heading home. No matter where Dani was when she called, she should have been here ages ago. You can drive anywhere in Haddonwood in half that time.
Just like Daisy, the ingredients for the cookie dough are waiting.
Well, except for the bag of chocolate chips. It’s open on the coffee table. Every few minutes, Daisy grabs another handful. If Dani makes her wait too much longer, the cookie dough will be chocolate chip-less.
On the one hand, Daisy is worried. What if her sister was in a crash? With Dani, that’s a very real possibility. But the even more likely scenario is that she was driving Chad home when she called, and they decided to make a side trip to Rich Road, the local make-out spot.
Which, of course, leads her to a secondary version of that scenario. Maybe Dani never planned to come home at all. The only reason she called was to mess with Daisy’s head. She’s in the backseat of the Sorento, making out with Chad, and they’re both having a big laugh at the idea of her sitting here on the couch.
Waiting.
Daisy tries to tell herself that Dani wouldn’t do that. And this is more or less true. The sister she sat next to this morning in this very room listening to their father play the piano would never pull a stunt like that.
But the Dani they’d encountered at the bonfire? She’d do it in a heartbeat. That girl had seemed like a grade-A bitch.
In fact, the girl at the bonfire hadn’t seemed much like Dani at all. More like a caricature. Like someone had removed all of the good parts of Dani Gray, then bundled the bad parts together and squeezed them into a black leather catsuit.
You’re not my mother.
Every time she thinks about that snide comment, Daisy wants to punch something. The girl at the bonfire had been every bit as spiteful as the Bette Davis character in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
That thought takes her back to the Hart, and the fact that she’s apparently spent the past month in a condemned building, stuck in some sort of bizarro fantasy world. She simply walked by and wished the place was still open. That she worked there. And the next time she walked by, a Help Wanted sign was in the window. That’s some major wish-fulfillment action.
She glances at the clock again and grabs some more chocolate chips. If Dani doesn’t show up soon, she’s going to barf. As she pops the chocolate into her mouth, though, it occurs to her that her palms aren’t hurting anymore. The cut on her finger is still a bit sore, but the palms are just itchy. True, the cuts had been shallow, not much deeper than paper cuts, really. There had been dozens of them, though, and she’s had paper cuts that throbbed for hours.
Daisy pulls the tape loose and slowly unwraps the gauze on her right hand. The cuts are still there, but they’ve scabbed over. The same is true on the left hand. She starts to rewrap them, but there really doesn’t seem to be any need.
What had she done to gain extra health points? This question leads straight to the idea that’s been lurking at the back of her head since midafternoon. Every time she got close to the thought, however, it felt like it was yanked away.
The answer feels painfully obvious now, and yet utterly impossible.
“We’re in a game.”
She says the words aloud, to absolutely no one, before they can slip away. “We’re stuck in a freakin’ game. Do I level up for knowing that?”
There’s no response, although she’s not really sure what she expected. A voice shouting Ding-ding-ding, we HAVE a winner, maybe? Or the victory fanfare at the end of the Mario Kart game that she and Dani used to play when they were little?
That was the tinny music she heard at Martha’s house earlier, wasn’t it?
An old memory hits her like a gut punch.
She’s lying on her back, propped up on her elbows, waiting for Dani to finish her turn on the time trials. Dani’s wearing a Lilo and Stitch nightgown, sitting with her legs sprawled out in front of her, as she feverishly pushes the buttons on the game controller. A bowl of Cocoa Puffs is next to her.
Daisy is bored. She wants to play something else—something two players can do at the same time.
Or better yet, go outside. The tree swing Dad put up earlier in the summer spins slowly in the wind. She can see it through the sliding glass door in the dining room. Taunting her.
Only, there are no trees in their backyard. There never have been, because the land the house sits on used to be part of the cornfield before Teddy decided to sell off a few acres to put his son through college.
Where is that memory coming from, then? It feels absolutely real. But then so did the entire month of working at the Hart. So did the people in the audience.
Figuring out that she’s inside a game is only a tiny fragment of the puzzle, though. The real questions are still unanswered. Leaving aside the obvious one—how the hell does someone end up inside a game?—she needs to figure out what kind of game this is. What is the objective? How do you win?
And…is it multiplayer?
Being trapped in a game is frightening enough. But being trapped in a game all by herself? That scares the holy hell out of her. Earlier, when Tucker was leaving, when she told him he was awesome, her mind ventured briefly to the possibility that maybe he was too awesome. That maybe he wasn’t real.
She pulls in a shaky breath, remembering the scene in the mirror and the vision, or whatever the hell it was, from this morning, the one that left her frozen in place on the sidewalk.
Alone. In the dark. Mom. Dad. Dani. All of them gone.
Maybe Tucker, too. Everyone she loves is gone.
Daisy brings her arm to her mouth and bites down as hard as she can. It’s partly to keep from screaming, but also to remind herself that she is real. She can feel pain. She can feel.
And while she can’t be certain about anyone else, she has to believe that Tucker is real. Maybe Chase, as well. Tucker and Chase both saw what happened at the theater. They didn’t vanish when everyone else did.
Daisy glances out the front window, hoping Tucker’s car will be in the driveway. It’s not. He said he was going to check on Julie and Marybeth. Neither of those stops should have taken this long. She doesn’t know what he had to do at the station, though. Why hadn’t she let him talk her out of waiting here alone?
She paces the room for a few minutes, trying to fight down a panic attack. Deep breaths, in and out, like the therapist said. It doesn’t seem to be working, though, and her mind flashes to the bottle of Xyleva in her bedroom. She even takes a few steps toward the hallway before she remembers the warning on the fridge at Martha Yarn’s house…STOP XYLEVA.
Well, there’s a nice little conundrum.
The game that she’s tra
pped inside tells her to stop taking a medication that she actually stopped taking months ago. Maybe that means she should take it? Maybe this is all part of some post-traumatic psychosis and stopping the medication has driven her stark raving mad. It’s the most logical explanation for seeing giant ants crawling out of movie screens and crowds of people—non-player characters, she supposes—vanishing into thin air. The most logical explanation for seeing her father featured in a Hitchcock film. Seeing magnetic letters moving on their own. Seeing pod people.
But the one thing she remembers about the Xyleva is that it made her a little loopy. The doctor had to reduce her dosage during the daytime because she was finding it hard to focus in class. And right now, she’s absolutely certain that she needs a clear head.
Daisy goes into the kitchen, drops the bag of chocolate chips on the counter, and unplugs her iPad from the charger. The most important thing at this moment is to stay occupied. Find something constructive to do until Dani or Tucker get back.
And right now, the only constructive task at hand is to figure out the rules of this game. The theme is obvious, and Daisy suspects that one is on her. She’s spent the past few years watching horror movies, reading the classics, and compiling lists of every sub-genre. It was an interest even before her mom’s death, but it became something very close to an obsession afterward. Her dad had seen it as evidence that she wasn’t handling the loss well, and he was right in one sense. But the therapist had helped them both to see that the movies and books weren’t the problem. They were simply a coping mechanism.
Scary books and scary movies end, he’d said. They’re manageable servings of grief and terror, and when they end, you look around and see that the world isn’t quite as bad as you thought. Or, at the very least, you know it could be much, much worse.