by Bryan Smith
Dedication
This one is for Brian Keene.
Part One
Coming Attractions
Chapter One
There was something odd about that music. The sound was discordant. Jarring and shrill. But that wasn’t the odd thing about it. What was odd was how tantalizingly familiar it was. The defining element of the music was the sound of seemingly one thousand tortured violins being violently assaulted by an army of escaped mental patients bent on wringing the soundtrack of hell from their undoubtedly stolen instruments. Rapidly repeated, stinging bursts of sudden sharp sounds, followed by longer and more ominous-sounding notes in a lower register.
The overall effect was so like something he’d heard a million times before, with perhaps a couple of minor variations, perhaps wedged between the more familiar notes as an afterthought, a way of warding off a copyright violation lawsuit.
Yet…he couldn’t quite put his finger on why it was so damn familiar.
What the hell is that monstrous noise?
John Dorsey stirred from his semidoze and squinted at the fuzzy images on the television in his living room. There was nothing wrong with the picture. And his eyesight was usually fine. The fuzziness was instead a result of the many beers he’d consumed since his breakfast earlier that morning. Wait…was it still morning?
He swiveled his head slowly to the right, squinting harder than ever now.
“Ah.”
Sunshine was visible through the half-drawn blind above the buzzing air conditioner. Didn’t quite solve the mystery. Could be late morning still. Could be afternoon. Could be early evening. But something about the glaringly bright quality of the sunshine made him doubt the last possibility. It was still relatively early, though not so early that he hadn’t had time to put a respectable dent in that case of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Speaking of…
He glanced down at his dangling right hand, which was hanging over the arm of his recliner. The top of the can was held very lightly by the tips of his fingers. Even the slightest lessening of his grip would send it tumbling to the carpeted floor. He frowned and got a more solid grip on the can. He then sat up straight and trained his eyes on the television.
Little less fuzzy now.
Huh. Interesting.
A woman on the screen was attired in a very skimpy bikini. Nice body. Long, black-as-sin hair flowing over milk-white shoulders. She was screaming and running down a long, shadowy hallway. Someone was chasing her. A dude, naturally. Very large, of course, and wearing some kind of freaky mask. It was easy to see why you’d want to run away from him. Partly it was the ugly mask, but mostly it was because of the huge, whirring chainsaw held high over one of his shoulders.
“Jesus. Not another fucking Chainsaw sequel.”
This one looked to be the worst yet. The production values were clearly far below the norm for the series. This one looked like one of those schlocky shot-on-video pieces of garbage that had a tendency to sit unrented for years on the shelves of failing video stores everywhere. And the chainsaw-wielding psycho on the screen didn’t look right at all. The mask looked cheap. A flimsy piece of plastic shit you might buy for a buck at Walmart the day after Halloween. Nothing at all like a mask stitched together from dead human flesh. And the guy lacked the classic Leatherface physique. John’s mouth curled in disgust. Clearly this was a case of some hack with a camera “rebooting” or “reimagining” the franchise. The only question was how in God’s name these obvious amateurs had managed to wrest away the rights to…
He frowned again.
“Huh.”
The woman had reached the end of the hallway. The door there was locked. Of course. It had to be locked. Otherwise, she couldn’t turn to the camera, as she was doing now, splay a hand across her mouth, and scream again as the dude with the chainsaw at last got close enough to begin the butchery.
A title in wavy yellow letters splashed across the screen.
Chainsaw Maniac!
John raised the can of Pabst to his mouth. “The fuck is this?”
Of course. Should have been obvious from the beginning. Not an official Chainsaw sequel, but instead a cheap rip-off. As the faux-Leatherface character raised his weapon and began to lower the whirring blade toward the cringing babe, the tempo of the music increased again. Now that he’d come out of his beer-induced stupor, his synapses were firing faster and he was able to place why the music was so familiar.
He snapped the fingers of his left hand and jabbed a forefinger at the screen. “Psycho! You cheap bastards are ripping off Bernard Herrmann’s score!” He chuckled and raised the can to his mouth again. “Hell, of course you are. So many others have done it, so why not you, right?”
He laughed.
The laughter cut off abruptly as it dawned on him that there was a disturbing lack of refreshing cerveza streaming down his horribly parched throat. He scowled at the empty can as he shook it. “Someone has stolen my beer. This offense cannot be tolerated. I declare global thermonuclear war as just retribution.” He chuckled. “Unless, of course, a diplomatic solution is hastily arranged.” He pitched his voice higher and jerked his head toward the kitchen. “Marie! Another beer! Stat! The fate of the world hangs in the balance.”
He laughed some more. Then he frowned. This wasn’t like him. This…jocularity. This delirious good humor. No. No. That wasn’t quite fair. It was what he’d once been like, a lifetime ago, or, in normal people terms, approximately five months ago. Which, imagine this, happened to coincide with his layoff from the well-paying job he’d held for nearly a decade. Yes, a thing like that, especially in today’s barren job market, was enough to crush any man’s spirit.
So…why was he feeling so good?
He kept frowning for a moment. Then he smiled and shrugged. “Whatever. Life is full of mysteries.”
The images on the screen shifted. The wavy yellow letters blurred and spread across the screen, giving way a moment later to new images of horror and destruction. A postapocalyptic world. Burned-out buildings and piles of debris in smoky streets. Hordes of drooling, slack-jawed people in tattered clothes lurching around in the streets, most of them bearing evidence of grisly wounds.
The music was different now, too, the derivative symphonic sounds replaced by a bludgeoning, staccato heavy metal beat and rumbling, growled vocals. He couldn’t place the song, but the band sounded kind of like Disturbed. Only it wasn’t Disturbed. It was some sound-alike outfit, some anonymous group of nu-metal douchebags whose tunes were undoubtedly far cheaper to license.
A black helicopter flew high above the lumbering throngs of the dead, the whir of the chopper blades intermittently audible between bursts of metal riffery. A man clad in a helmet, goggles, and military armor leaned out of the copter, an M-16 clutched in muscular hands. But he didn’t fire his gun. It would obviously be a waste of ammunition. There were just too many of them.
Too many zombies.
Another set of wavy yellow letters splashed across the screen.
Rise of the Dead!
The production values on this one were obviously higher. Still not up to big studio, A-list Hollywood standards—some of the zombie makeup was too obviously fake—but clearly several notches above the ridiculous chainsaw thing. And yet, the seamless transition from those scenes to these, along with the identical font used for the movie titles, implied an obvious connectedness. John’s instinct to snarkily pick apart cheap movies yielded to a genuine interest.
John belatedly realized a stentorian voiceover announcer was speaking. He made himself focus on his words: “Chainsaws. Zombies. The undying lust of the undead. Blood flowing thick as a river through dirty city streets. Women in danger and the maniacs who cr
ave their demise—”
John giggled.
He couldn’t help it.
Crave their demise?
The ad copy for this thing sounded as cheap and cheesy as the movies themselves.
“—all of these dark wonders and more will be on display all weekend at the Late Night Horror Show film festival at the Sunshine 6 cineplex in Murfreesboro. Doctor Ominous presents six masterpieces of horror. See them all…if you dare.”
John giggled.
But wait. Who was this Doctor Ominous character? It had the ring of a moniker a cable TV horror host might use, though he was unaware of anyone with a local host gig going by that name. Not that it mattered much. It was just strange.
And also…
“If I dare? Ain’t no ‘if’ about it, motherfuckers.”
He realized the truth of the statement as he spoke it. The movies looked bad, but bad movies could be their own kind of good time. Especially if enough booze was consumed, which would most assuredly be the case if he had anything to say about it. Suddenly he had a plan for the evening that involved something more than slowly rotting in front of the television. Sure, it wouldn’t involve anything productive or particularly positive, but at least it would get him out of the apartment, out from between these too-close-together walls, this grim, Kafkaesque space he had begun to suspect was a not-insubstantial contributing factor to his slow decline. He would get out and breathe, enjoy the simple pleasure of just being around other people. He would feel human again, and maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t be such a small thing at all.
It might even be the first necessary small step toward getting his life back on track.
He stared at the empty beer can in his hand and was reminded of something.
“Oh yeah. Need a refill.”
He turned his head slowly to the left, stared beyond the partition that separated the small apartment’s living room from the cramped kitchen. Marie usually sat at the little table there and read books or magazines, while he sat in front of the television and drank himself into oblivion. They hadn’t been interacting in any meaningful way since just after the layoff. She didn’t nag him or cry or get hysterical. She just sat in there in deep, uncharacteristic silence.
Brooding.
He often thought things might be better if she did show some signs of losing her patience or temper. It would prove she still cared. It might give him just the kick in the ass he needed to get out and find some kind of job, even if he had to humble himself by taking some position that paid very little and was obviously beneath him. Fast food. Convenience store clerk. Car wash attendant. Something. Anything. He hoped like hell he could convince her to go with him to the film festival. He smiled at that. A real date. How long since they’d been anywhere together socially?
Months?
A year?
Too long, in any case. A night out might make her smile again. He’d give anything to see that.
But—
Where the hell is she?
The apartment was small. She could only be either in the bathroom or their bedroom. He shifted his weight, feeling the bloat of who-knew-how-many beers in his tender belly, and leaned forward in the recliner. “Marie?”
There was a faint note of panic in his voice. He recognized it and told himself it was stupid. There was no good reason to worry. She was lying down, taking a nap, or maybe was in the bathroom, taking a shit. No reason to worry. It quickly became a mantra.
No reason…no reason…no reason.
He made his voice even louder. “Marie!?”
Still no answer.
His heart was beating faster now, thudding heavily in his chest.
No reason…no reason…
“Shut up,” he muttered as he hauled himself out of the recliner. The beer can slid from his shaking fingers and landed softly on the carpeted floor as he staggered toward the open bedroom door.
“Marie?”
His voice sounded weaker now, full of fear.
He stepped into the bedroom.
Marie was there, stretched out on the bed, and it became instantly clear why she had failed to answer his multiple entreaties. She was naked, her body very still and covered in blood. Her mouth hung open and her eyes stared up at nothing. Her hair was matted with sticky gore. It was easy to see why. Someone had used the heavy brass base of the nightstand lamp to smash in the back of her head. And she had been stabbed. A lot. More times than he could even begin to count.
She was dead.
Unmistakably, irreversibly, undeniably, completely fucking dead.
After a long moment’s silence, a shrill, strangled sound issued from John’s throat. He staggered closer to the bed, the strangled sound growing louder and more distraught with each step. Everything became more crisply defined. He saw how pulped her cheekbones were. He saw the crookedness of her previously perfectly straight nose. He saw white fragments of teeth amidst the dark gore on the bed sheet.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhh…”
John’s eyes rolled back in his head and his body pitched forward as he fell unconscious across his wife’s bloody corpse.
Chapter Two
Kira Matthews was in her usual midafternoon spot behind the counter at Mondo Mocha. She was leaning over the counter, her bare elbows propped on the scuffed and stained old wood of the countertop. The tip of a forefinger moved slowly over the screen of her iPad as she surfed over to another page of the horror festival’s rather dinky website. Kira was no web designer, but even to her untrained eye the site’s design seemed amateurish.
Stock graphics combined with a clumsy, nonintuitive interface to render navigation a supremely irritating experience. Any site with multiple pages needed an all-purpose menu allowing quick navigation back to any page within the site, but the geniuses who’d put this thing together hadn’t bothered. The only menu was on the main page, a very long column of links down the left-hand side of the page, which included links to pages with plot overviews, individual actor bios, director bios, and reviews. She’d surfed back to the main page somewhere in the neighborhood of six trillion and ten times. Just a rough estimate. If anything, that was lowballing it. The site triggered vague memories of early websites from the ’90s, when she’d been a kid. She couldn’t figure out whether the site’s primitive design was an intentionally cheesy homage to web design of a bygone era or if it looked so bad simply because the designers really were that inept.
She had read nearly every page within the site at this point, lingering longest on the pages devoted to Blood Lust, a vampire film. It looked every bit as cheesy as the rest of the festival’s roster of schlock, but she had a particular fondness for vamps. The fascination had its roots in a youthful exposure to the film version of Interview with the Vampire. Thus began an obsession that occupied much of her teenage years. She devoured everything related to bloodsuckers, both in film and literature, accumulating an impressive collection of books and DVDs that encompassed everything from all the classic works of the subgenre to all the cheesiest shitfests ever made and everything in between. Including the Twilight books, a thing she rarely confessed to these days.
Her exhaustive review of the horror festival’s site was a testament to how monumentally bored she was. Most of her friends were out of town. Some just for the weekend, but most had scattered to the four corners of civilization for the summer. Today was Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, and most of the Mid-South University student population had cleared out of town shortly after finals a couple weeks back. The little coffee shop was campus adjacent and was a popular place for laid-back studying and web surfing when classes were in session. Customer traffic would be light until the students began to return in mid-August. Right now, in fact, the shop was empty. The last paying customer of the afternoon had shuffled off almost a half hour earlier. The only other person in the shop at the moment was Miss Mildred, the owner. She was in the back doing some sort of half-assed inventory.
The bell above the door jangled as someone came into
the coffee shop. Kira glanced up from her iPad and smiled when she saw Lashon Miller stroll up to the counter.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Lashon set a book on the counter and yawned as she stretched her arms over her head. Kira glanced at the book. Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King.
“Haven’t you read that already?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you have any new books to read?”
Lashon shrugged. “Bored. Nothing new appeals right now. So I’m rereading some shit I like. Hook me up with a large caramel latte, please.”
Kira set to work making the drink. “What are you doing tonight?”
Lashon flipped dark hair out of her face with a toss of her head and shifted her posture so that all her weight was balanced on one leg. She turned the little wire rack of folk CDs that sat on the counter. “Don’t know. The usual, I guess. Sit at home. Be fucking bored. Unless, like, I go on an epic fucking killing spree down at the square. Still haven’t ruled that out.”
“So…still haven’t patched things up with Greg?”
Lashon continued to slowly spin the wire rack. “No.”
The monotone reply worried Kira. Lashon and Greg Nelson had been a hot item for over a year. They had been mad for each other, the kind of couple given to frequent public displays of affection, the superinappropriate, borderline-foreplay kind that made people uncomfortable. About a month ago it had come to an abrupt end. Lashon had refused to talk about it and so it had become a subject of gossip and speculation among the others in their circle.
Kira finished the drink and set the brimming cup on the counter. Lashon picked up the cup and took a small sip, making a soft sound of satisfaction. “Mmm. I don’t have any money.”
“What?”
“I don’t have any money.”
Kira sighed. “For fuck’s sake, Lashon.”
Lashon took another sip of her drink and said nothing, but stared levelly at Kira.
Kira rolled her eyes. “Whatever, bitch. I’ll pay for it.”
“Thank you.”