by Bryan Smith
He drove his fist forward.
And in the same instant saw a smile spread across her face.
Oh shit.
A hand clamped hard around his wrist, stopping the intended blow cold. He looked into her eyes and saw they were again as sharp as ever.
“It’s the girl, isn’t it? Your friend?”
Monroe’s hand was still clenched around her throat, so her words emerged as a strangled wheeze. He tried tightening his grip, bearing down with everything he had. He’d squeeze her head right off her fucking body if he could.
But she peeled his hand from her throat with disconcerting ease and smiled again. “So be it. You’ve used up the last of my good will. Now I kill you. Again.”
She acted before he could even think about fleeing. One moment he was standing there in front of her, one hand paralyzed by her grip. The next instant he was flying backward at high speed, smashing through the stall door. He continued to sail through the air until his back collided with the edge of a sink against the far wall. Pain exploded throughout his body, agony ripping at seemingly every tendon as he pitched forward, cracking his knees and then his chin on the floor tiles. He pressed his hands against the tiles, feeling their cross-hatched patterns against his palms, and tried to rise, knowing he didn’t have much time if he hoped to survive.
He raised his head and saw the hem of Lilith’s little black dress swaying as she walked calmly out of the stall. She stopped a few feet in front of him and he had a moment to admire the elegant turn of her ankles in her black heels. Then she raised one of those heels and stomped down on his outstretched right hand. The spiked heel punched through flesh and splintered bone. He screamed at the fresh agony and grabbed for her ankle with the hand that wasn’t impaled.
The room was chaos now. Other women in the room were screaming and scrambling to get out. One woman tripped and fell hard across his back, making him cry out in pain yet again. The woman stepped on his back once she got to her feet and started moving again, the sharp heel of her shoe gouging his tailbone. Yet another spike of searing pain. Goddamn these women and their fucking lethal-weapon footwear!
Monroe’s free hand was clenched around Lilith’s ankle. He jerked hard at it to no avail. She began to grind her shoe against his hand, twisting the heel inside the raw wound and driving it in deeper. He screamed and beat at the floor with his other hand.
Lilith laughed. “Thank you for this, Monroe. My guilty conscience is clear now. And I’m actually enjoying watching you squirm. Now squirm a little more!”
She increased the pressure on his hand, grinding more viciously this time.
He screamed and begged for mercy.
“The only mercy you’ll get is a fast death.” She laughed again. “A second one.”
Her shoe came away from his mangled hand. She grabbed him and jerked him to his feet. He’d been upright less than a full second when she spun him around and slammed him against the edge of a sink. She wrenched an arm up hard behind his back. He was effectively immobilized.
“What’s going on in here?”
Someone else came into the room. A woman, Monroe instantly knew from the sound of heels on the tiled floor. He cringed. If he somehow survived this, that sound would never again have any sexy connotations for him. Just memories of pain.
“Lilith?”
Monroe glanced to his left and saw the busty blonde vampire standing there in her shimmering red party dress. He hadn’t talked to her much, but he’d heard the others call her Melissa. Fuck it. Might as well give it a shot. “She’s trying to kill me.”
Melissa took pointed note of his injured hand. “What’s happening here?”
“Fucker tried to rape me.”
“Bullshit.”
Lilith twisted his arm harder, making him grit his teeth against the pain. “Shut up. It’s true, Mel. Son of a bitch tried to force himself on me.”
Melissa looked at Monroe. Her expression hadn’t changed. She gave no indication of favoring one side against the other. “Is she telling the truth?”
“Well—” He grimaced as Lilith twisted his arm still harder, a not-so-subtle warning to keep his mouth shut about certain things. But she planned to kill him anyway, so fuck it. “It’s sort of true, but she’s leaving out the part where she told me about the army of vampire hunters she’s been working with to—”
“LIAR!” She twisted his arm yet again and shoved him against the sink. “Dirty fucking liar!”
“Let the boy have his say, Lilith.”
Lilith was seething with anger now. “What!? You can’t believe his crazy fucking story! You know me, Mel.”
Now something like a smile twitched the edges of Melissa’s mouth. “Yes. I do. A little too well, actually.” She looked at Monroe again. “Finish what you were going to say.”
Monroe plunged ahead before Lilith could start screaming again. “She’s a spy for the hunters. Double agent. They’re hitting Victor’s place tonight and mean to kill everybody there. Another squad was sent to take out the rest of you.”
Lilith laughed at this, but Monroe detected a clear tinge of desperation in the sound. He hoped like hell Melissa heard it, too. “He’s lying, Mel. You know he is.”
“Let the boy go, Lilith.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Let him go. Now.”
To Monroe’s great surprise, Lilith relinquished her hold on him. Never one to question an unexpectedly fortuitous turn of events, he scurried immediately away from her and moved into position behind Melissa. He looked at his hand. The wound was still throbbing, but he was no longer in blinding agony. The wound even looked slightly smaller.
Melissa glanced over her shoulder at him. “It’ll heal, don’t worry. Get some fresh blood in you and you’ll be good as new in no time.” She shifted her attention back to Lilith. “Wish I could say the same for the rest of our friends.”
Lilith turned pale. Paler than usual, anyway. It was the first time Monroe had seen her look scared. He took a nasty delight in seeing this.
Melissa moved a step closer to the other vampire.
Lilith started shaking, but remained where she was. It was as if she couldn’t move.
Strange.
Monroe had no clue why Melissa would have such power over Lilith. He was just glad she did. Maybe it had something to do with the hierarchies of the vampire world, a subject that was still almost entirely a mystery to him. All he really knew was Melissa had saved his ass. Which meant he was Team Melissa from here on out.
Melissa took another step closer to Lilith, who was trembling all over now. She looked sort of like an animal trapped outside in a driving snowstorm. Another step closer and Lilith started to weep, tears cascading in rivers down her porcelain cheeks.
“Please…I’m sorry. Please…”
“They’re all dead, Lilith. All our friends and all your fucking hunter friends, too. I got lucky and spotted them just before they could close in. A second later and I would have been dead, too. Even so, it was a close thing.”
“I’m sorry. So sorry…”
“Stop saying that. You’re not sorry at all. You’re only sorry you got caught. You fucking traitor bitch.”
Melissa’s hands snapped outward lightning-fast, like striking snakes, and seized Lilith by the back of the head and under the chin. She snarled like a beast and gave her hands a single savage twist. Lilith’s head came free of her body with surprising ease. Despite his own close call at her hands, Monroe was surprised by the effect this had on him. He felt vaguely sick. Perhaps because it was so sudden and shocking and irreversible. Blood erupted fountain-like from the stump of Lilith’s neck. Her headless body remained upright a moment longer, before toppling over and crashing to the floor.
Melissa turned away from the corpse with a sigh. “So sad. I sired her long ago. It’s why she couldn’t flee from me or protect herself.” A melancholy expression played across her features as she stared at the head clasped in her hands. She smoothed a lock of black hair back f
rom its forehead in an almost gentle, affectionate way. “She was one of my special ones. One of my favorites. It’s why I cut her so much slack, even when I suspected her heart wasn’t fully in this vampire thing.”
Monroe didn’t know what to say. “That, uh…too bad.”
Except that fuck no, it isn’t. Ding dong! The bitch is dead!
Melissa held the head out to him. “Here. This is for you.”
Monroe stared at her in silent stupefaction for a moment. Then he accepted the grisly gift, taking Lilith’s severed head in his hands and cradling it gingerly. It struck him that this was the second severed head he’d held in his hands in less than a day.
My life has taken a really kind of fucked turn.
Melissa moved toward the bathroom door. “Let’s go.”
Monroe hurried after her. “Where are we going?”
She talked over her shoulder as they entered the hallway outside the bathroom and kept moving. Only now did Monroe notice that the constant blare of the dance music had ceased. Except for some corpses, the hallway was deserted. “Where else? Back to the mansion.”
“But…Lilith said there’d be an army of hunters there. What can we possibly do against a fucking army?”
“Die, probably.”
“Oh.”
They emerged from the hallway into the area by the bar. Monroe glanced beyond the brass rail separating the bar area from the dance floor and saw evidence of carnage. Bodies and pieces of bodies. Great splashes of blood everywhere. “Victor sired me. I have to go. I need all the help I can get.”
“You don’t have to threaten me or anything. I’m going with you.”
They hooked a left away from the bar, heading for the club’s entrance. There was a sound of approaching sirens as they reached it.
Melissa looked at him. “Right. Come on then. We’ve got killing to do.”
They walked out of the club.
Third Intermission
Greg stood on the sidewalk outside the cineplex and scanned the parking lot. He saw the same smattering of cars he remembered from prior to entering the theater. There were maybe a few more now, but overall it had been a sparsely attended night at the horror festival. Which was a blessing of sorts, as it meant only a few dozen people—at most—got sucked into this alien death machine masquerading as a decaying cineplex in a moderately bad section of an unassuming little college town.
Yeah.
Only a few dozen people…and one of them is Lashon.
Rather than departing immediately—as he knew he should—he remained on the sidewalk a while longer, staring out at the street beyond, watching the headlights of occasional cars go zipping by in either direction. He thought about the people in those cars and couldn’t help marveling at how oblivious they were to the astonishing, horrifying thing happening in the middle of their town. Not one of them would ever suspect something so fantastic and insane could be happening right under their noses. And he could never tell anyone about it. They would think he was crazy. Or, even worse, the wrong person might get wind of his tale and he’d find himself being interrogated by black-suited men from some shadowy government agency.
No. No way. Fuck that.
For better or for worse, his lips were sealed forever. He’d be taking this secret to his grave. He stepped off the curb and started across the parking lot toward his car. The sooner he was in it and speeding away from all this weirdness, the better. His thoughts were on the nearly full bottle of Jameson waiting for him in a cupboard back at his apartment when he was stopped in his tracks by a stray memory of Lashon.
It was from last year. From before things started go bad. Before she began to get so stressed out by everything. It was his birthday. She had taken him on a seemingly aimless ride out to the country. It was a pleasant enough excursion along winding rural back roads and would have sufficed as a kind of birthday treat in and of itself. He had enjoyed her company that much back then. Just being with her was always enough.
But Lashon had more in mind that day than just a pleasant drive through idyllic countryside scenery. Just as he had become certain they had reached the official exact center of Absolutely the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, she took a detour down yet another side road. As they came around a bend in the road, the shroud of trees parted and he got his first look at the Starlite Drive-In.
It was an outdoor movie theater, the kind his father talked of so glowingly when he was in one of his nostalgic moods. Only weeks earlier, Greg had told Lashon about that, mentioning how he had never been to one himself and then going on to say how sad it was there were so few of them left these days. And evidently she’d remembered.
He’d had a big grin on his face as they pulled up to the ticket booth. “Holy shit! I can’t believe this. Where’d you hear about this place?”
Lashon was smiling, too, as she paid for their tickets and drove on through. “The Scene.” The Scene was the local free “alternative” paper. “Article last week about it. Thought right away about your dad’s drive-in stories.”
“And you didn’t say a word.”
“You have no idea how hard that was, boy-o. You better appreciate this.”
He did.
They watched two movies that night. Second-run horror films. Pretty good ones, too, unlike the low-budget pieces of garbage at tonight’s horror festival. But the movies were a secondary pleasure that night. Then, it was all about the setting, which for him was exotic. They munched popcorn and enjoyed each other’s company. An epic makeout session led to lovemaking in the backseat.
“The best night of my life.”
Greg grunted.
So now I’m talking to myself. Great. I’m crazy. Obviously.
As further proof of that, he turned around and started back toward the theater. He was going back inside. The decision had been made at a subconscious level, powerful instinct driving him back the way he’d come before he was even fully cognizant of what he was doing. His conscious mind caught up to what was happening seconds later, but even then his stride did not falter.
He wasn’t scared. Not really. Not anymore. This was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. He loved Lashon. Even after all that had happened, that was the truth and he couldn’t just leave her to a fate like this. Probably it was already too late to help her. And probably the only thing he’d wind up accomplishing here would be to disappear or get himself killed.
So be it.
It was the right thing to do. He had to try.
He stepped over the curb again and crossed the sidewalk to the theater entrance. After only the briefest hesitation, he pushed the door open and stepped inside again.
The interior of the place remained the same austere all-white. He was mildly surprised it had not reverted to an illusory facsimile of a real cineplex lobby. It seemed sort of reckless on the part of whatever beings operated this strange facility, as did leaving the door unlocked. This posed troubling questions without obvious answers. Rather than pondering them any further, Greg began an exploration of the faux-lobby.
The plain white cubicle that had been the ticket booth was almost entirely featureless, with the exception of a thin slot in the front panel. The movie tickets had been dispensed through that slot, but a glance at the underside of the panel only deepened the mystery.
He saw no device through which tickets would have been printed and fed. Frowning, he reached into his hip pocket to retrieve his own ticket. His frown deepened as he examined the blank white stub. He clearly remembered words imprinted on that stub, but it now appeared that had also been only illusion.
He tried to conceive of technology sufficiently advanced to alter his perceptions to that degree and failed. And it struck him again how completely out of his depth he was here. He understood none of what was happening on any level and couldn’t fathom how he might even begin to unlock the puzzle of this place.
But that didn’t mean he was giving up. He had committed to a course of action and he meant to see it through
to the bitter end. A check of what had been the concessions stand revealed more of the same strange featurelessness. There was no popcorn maker. Yet he remembered people in their seats gobbling popcorn as clearly as he remembered the words printed on his now-blank ticket.
So strange.
Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
Greg’s attention was next drawn to the several tall protrusions jutting from the wall where the row of video games had once stood. He crossed the lobby to stand before one of the protrusions and stared at the strange pattern dancing across its black screen. He watched the colors swirl, coalesce, and break apart again before shifting his attention to the control panel in front of the screen. A single white toggle control and four white buttons arrayed around it.
Not knowing what else to do, Greg grasped the toggle and twitched it to the left. Nothing happened. He twitched it to the right. Still nothing happened. Still grasping the toggle, he started tapping the buttons with his other hand.
Greg gasped as the floor beneath him abruptly lurched.
And then he was descending.
Startled, he turned in a shaky circle and saw that he was sinking into the floor. The panel he was standing on had detached from the others and was lowering itself toward some underground chamber. Instinct made him slap his hands against the nearest adjacent panel. The coward in him wanted only to crawl up out of this hole that had appeared from nowhere and then get out of this fucking place.
But then he thought of Lashon.
And that magical night at the drive-in.
He let his hands slide away from the panel as he continued his descent into the unknown and the darkness below.
Somewhere beneath him he heard a faint sound of music playing.
Something he recognized.
Is that…Shriekback?
Chapter Twenty-Two
The interior of the bar was shrouded in oppressive gloom. Flickers of candlelight were visible through grime-smeared windows as a big, bearded man in a novelty tuxedo T-shirt hustled Brix and Jason through a small billiards room adjacent to the bar proper.