by Bryan Smith
Greg couldn’t help thinking of his own enduring obsession with Lashon, even in the wake of her attack on him. Maybe, much like this apparently deranged singer, he was also drawn to women with a dark or “bad” streak.
Ominous appeared to love the song, because he was again bounding about, doing one of his ridiculous, rhythmically challenged dances. Watching him, Greg couldn’t believe someone as goofy as Mr. “I Am Become God” held the fate of the woman he loved in his hands. Or that he was capable of anything at all, other than perennial first-place winner of the official Craziest Person in All Fucking Creation contest. He had to work at keeping one fact front and center, and that was the knowledge that Ominous was putting on a show for him. His loony exterior masked a far darker brand of inner madness.
The song ended and Ominous dropped into the big leather chair again. He laughed and mopped sweat from his brow with an already wet handkerchief. “I’ve got dance fever, son, and there ain’t no cure!” Another wild burst of laughter, followed by a big sigh.
He perked up when a new song—obviously by the same band as the “All Women Are Bad” people—started. “The Cramps! Gotta love ’em. Am I right?”
“Right.”
Ominous picked up the gun, put it in his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.
Click.
He set the gun on the desk in an incongruously nonchalant way and leaned forward in his chair with a peculiarly avid look on his face. “They say music soothes the savage beast. But is that really true? Personally, I find that a lot of music, particularly the really good stuff, stirs the beast. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Greg didn’t say anything at first. He was still trying to process the fresh disappointment at yet another dry fire of the gun. By his calculation, they were down to just two chambers. One plugged and one containing—ostensibly—a live round. The next time he put the gun in his mouth, he would have a fifty-fifty chance of either living or dying.
Ominous grinned in an irritatingly knowing way. “Getting down to the real nitty-gritty, aren’t we?” He pursed his lips, nodding thoughtfully. “Listen, Greg, you may not believe this, but I like to think of myself as essentially a fair guy. Go on, scoff if you like, but it’s the truth. So I’ll offer you one last chance to opt out. You can abandon the game and leave this place. You can live to see another day, and many more days beyond. This is your lifeline, Greg. Do you want to take it…” and now he pushed the gun to the edge of the desk again, “…or do you want to continue?”
Greg stared at the gun.
Sweat formed on his own brow as he thought it over. It shouldn’t even be a question. He had come this far. Risked this much. But shit was getting real now.
Fifty-fifty.
One click away from death.
Maybe.
He had been brave. Really fucking brave. No one could say otherwise or much blame him for taking the opt-out Ominous had offered. Then he thought of his last glimpse of Lashon in that basement of horrors and knew there was still no real choice.
He picked up the gun and put it in his mouth.
Then, for the last time, squeezed the trigger.
Lashon toppled to the floor again when a blow from Heidi’s closed fist connected solidly with her chin. The slaps and backhanded blows she and her brother had been meting out had been bad enough, but this was the hardest blow she had taken yet. The crazy bitch had deceptive strength. She looked like a sorority girl, but punched like a champion welterweight. She had probably had a lot of practice knocking people around. Lashon ached to lash back at her, but she had absorbed too much punishment with no opportunity at all to recuperate.
She rolled onto her side and stared at a row of shelving. The shelves had square compartments and in each was a jar containing preserved body parts. She saw eyes and hands and tongues and genitals floating in formaldehyde. Each compartment contained three or four such jars. There had to be several dozen of them in all. Christ, how many people had this demented family butchered over the years? Too many.
She no longer thought of these sickos as phony people. No longer thought of this world as not real. It was real enough, all right, regardless of whether it was derived from a work of fiction on another plane of existence. They were real, and all the people they had ever killed had been real. It made her sick to think of it.
All those lives…wasted…
Heidi squatted next to her and grabbed her roughly by a shoulder, then rolled her onto her back. “You ready to hang, bitch?”
Lashon sniffled. “Please…”
Heidi’s features formed a pinched expression of mock sympathy. “Please. Oh, please, please, please.” She said this in a lilting, singsong voice. Then she laughed. “Not so tough now, huh, killer? Keep begging. It’s music to my ears.”
Lashon sniffled again, but said nothing in response this time.
Heidi snapped a backhanded slap across her face. “Beg. That’s an order.”
Lashon still said nothing.
She got another, even harder slap for it. “You’re making me very angry. You should beg. Maybe I’ll kill you fast if you do.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Heidi laughed. “Why would I ever lie? Oh, I know.” She put a forefinger to her cheek and made her eyes go wide. “Because I’m crrrrrrrrraaaa-zzzyyy!”
She cackled in a gleeful, manic way meant to emphasize the point. Not that it needed emphasizing. Lashon was already fully convinced of the girl’s utter madness. It was something in their genes, a tainted strain of DNA that had poisoned them all from birth. Not that this excused anything any of them had done.
They all deserved to suffer.
To die.
But she’d had her chance to finish them off and had blown it.
Heidi leaned in close so that their faces were separated by just inches, dropping her voice to a whisper. “You know, it’s possible to hang alive on one of those hooks for hours. Rob was real good at placing motherfuckers on ’em just right so they’d suffer as long as possible. Blaine and me aren’t as strong as our dead brothers, but we’re gonna try our damnedest to make it as bad for you as possible. What do you think about that?”
Lashon’s eyes misted. “Fuck…you.”
Heidi giggled. “Oh, but I might fuck you. With a broom handle.” She was leering at her again. “While you’re hanging up there, all helpless and shit. What do you think about that?”
Lashon’s mouth came open, but whatever she had been about to say remained unspoken.
Because that was when something came crashing down the stairs.
The guy couldn’t have been any more oblivious when he came through the door into the kitchen. He was wearing a shit-eating grin that belied the grief he’d displayed over his lost family members not so many minutes earlier. Maybe his grief had been exaggerated. Or just reflexive and not something he felt so intensely below the surface. Or maybe it was because he was crazy and crazy people never went long without having some new sick thing on which to focus their malignant energies. Things such as smacking the girl around and terrorizing her with hints of even more fucked-up degradations to come. Whatever the explanation, John was grateful, because the man’s distraction spelled his doom.
John chopped him across the throat with the cleaver. He then pulled the man into a rough embrace and wrestled him away from the door as blood jetted from the gaping wound in his neck, blood that soaked the front of John’s already blood-drenched shirt. The man struggled against the embrace for a moment. Until John’s left hand reared back—and then snapped forward, burying the cleaver in the back of the man’s skull.
Then he struggled no more.
John allowed himself only the slightest moment to catch his breath. He had to keep acting fast if he hoped to save the girl. His desperate attempt was close to working beyond his wildest hopes, but the girl was still down there with Heidi, with whom he would have to deal as quickly and as brutally as possible. Because she was as dangerous all on her own as the rest had been put together.
He plucked the gun from the man’s waistband.
Steered the corpse back over to the cellar door.
Allowed himself a last moment to steel his nerves.
And then tossed the body down the stairs.
Melissa went over the makeshift plan again as they rode up together in the service elevator. The sound of gunfire, seemingly so close as they had entered the mansion from the courtyard, was now inaudible. The silence in the self-contained space was so perfect it was almost possible to believe the battle raging throughout the house wasn’t actually happening.
But Monroe knew better.
People were fighting and dying out there, vampire and human alike. It was a crazy thing to realize he was in the middle of a kind of war, but it was the truth.
“That helicopter is waiting to take Victor and your girl away. I’m banking on us getting there ahead of Victor. I know him. He’s methodical. He’ll make sure he has everything he needs and that every base is covered before he leaves. I’m thinking that’ll still take a few more minutes, regardless of the danger.”
“You’re hoping it’ll be a few more minutes.”
Melissa snapped a glare at him. “Obviously. And if I’m right, I’ll put you in the copter and send the pilot on his way with you and the girl.”
Monroe frowned. “Okay, so…what? Another copter comes in to take you and Victor away?”
“That’s what I’ll tell the pilot. He’s human. I can make him believe anything.”
“So what’s your way out? If there’s not another copter…”
Melissa looked at him, a sad smile dimpling the corners of her pretty mouth. “There’s not another way out. Victor and I go down together once the hunters breach the roof.”
“Hold on. Surely there’s room on the copter for all of us.”
Melissa shook her head. “There isn’t. And Victor wouldn’t let you come along even if there was room. This really is your only hope. And Victor wouldn’t abandon his new bride in favor of me. We’ll die together, but at least we’ll be together. The way it should be.”
“Jesus.”
The elevator car came to a stop and the door dinged open. The sound of the helicopters rotors was almost deafeningly loud as they hurried out into the cool night air.
They were more than halfway across the roof of the building when Kira saw something strange. The door to a service elevator located next to some AC units over by the edge of the roof slid open. This in itself was surprising. Not to mention frightening. She expected to see black-masked hunters come swarming onto the roof with their automatic weapons blazing. Instead, she saw Monroe and some woman in a red party dress come running toward them.
Jenna banged into her as Kira stopped in her tracks a couple-dozen yards from the helicopter and its whirling, noisy blades. “What are you doing? Keep going!”
Kira ignored her, calling out to the friend she’d figured was permanently lost to her. Submerged but still powerful feelings came surging back to the surface. “Monroe!”
Jenna grabbed her by an arm and tried to drag her toward the helicopter.
Kira shrugged free of her and went running toward Monroe. She saw that his eyes were brimming with tears as they drew close to each other. Her own eyes were moist. This was another thing that surprised her. She had assumed she was beyond feeling this kind of human emotion, but here it was.
And she was so happy to feel it.
Not just happy. Joyous.
Jenna started screaming at her as they embraced and kissed with a passion that was pure and more wonderful by far than anything she had experienced with Victor. There had been pleasure with Victor. She couldn’t deny that. But it hadn’t come from a place of true feeling. Of real love. This did.
Jenna’s screeching and gesturing became ever more animated.
And then it abruptly ended.
Kira broke the clinch with Monroe long enough to see that the woman in the red dress had torn Jenna’s head from her shoulders. She felt a reflexive but short-lived burst of anger. Short-lived, because somehow she knew this stranger wasn’t an enemy. She had come here with Monroe and he seemed to trust her.
That was good enough for her.
The woman and Monroe exchanged a few quick words. Last instructions. And goodbyes. Her name was Melissa. Kira was happy to know who she was. It was good to be able to properly thank an unexpected savior. But there was only time for a single word of thanks. Because after that Melissa had a last piece of business to tend to before they could depart. She stepped up into the helicopter and had a word with the pilot. When she reemerged, she evidently spied something that troubled her because her expression changed. Her eyes opened wide and her mouth dropped open.
The hunters? Had they finally breached the roof?
No. Kira sensed the truth without having to turn her head. Victor was somewhere back there, on the far side of the roof. Only Victor could terrify a creature as fearsome as this Melissa. Kira’s eyes brimmed with tears again.
There isn’t time to get away. He’ll stop us.
But he didn’t. For the first time during that long, long night, something finally worked out in their favor.
Melissa hustled them into the helicopter.
And as it rose slowly into the air—too painfully slow by far to suit her—Kira watched in helpless, sick wonder as the only vampire in all the world who might possibly be Victor’s match went to meet her death at his hands.
It was over before the helicopter banked away from the mansion and flew away into the night. Melissa lay dead and broken at Victor’s feet as he stood there and stared up at the receding helicopter. He didn’t flinch when the hunters at last broke through the reinforced steel door behind him. And he didn’t move as the heavily armed killers swarmed the roof and bore relentlessly down upon him.
Her last sight of the proud vampire was of him standing like that, watching his bride fly away into the night, forever lost to him now. It was the right thing, what had to happen, she knew that. Yet still it tore at her. Kira clutched at Monroe’s arm and buried her face against his shoulder, spilling tears of sorrow and regret.
And yet she also felt something very close to happiness.
Monroe was with her again.
Sometimes, she thought, we really do get the happy endings we deserve.
There hadn’t been many zombies in the area right around the cineplex in those first confused moments after their arrival in this world, and fortunately that was still the case. Brix spied a handful of staggering mobile corpses as they came screeching into the parking lot, but the living dead presence here was nowhere near as thick as what they had so narrowly eluded down by the university. In fact, it seemed as if there were significantly fewer present than she remembered from earlier. Brix suspected many of the more agile zombies in the area had attempted to pursue them and had simply not returned, because why would they? There was no more food to be had here. Well…not until now.
She spared the burned-out hulk of her truck a quick glance as she sped toward the cineplex. It again struck her as odd that it was there at all. Or that Jason’s car had been here. She and Jason were not from this world, so it made no sense. Unless they had counterparts here, natives to this world whose lives were mirror images of their own, and some reason other than seeing a movie had brought them to this place at the onset of a zombie apocalypse. Or maybe the presence of the vehicles had something to do with their proximity to the dimensional-shifting event and because of some kind of mystical link between humans and their possessions. She guessed either explanation was possible, even as tenuous as they seemed, but she pushed the question from her mind because there was a larger issue to contend with now.
She guided the Firebird to a stop at the curb outside the theater and glanced at Jason. “You ready for this?”
He grunted. “Not really. But fuck it, you’re right. What else are we gonna do?”
Brix twisted in her seat to look at Ben, whose wary expression told her he still believed he was rid
ing with a couple of world-class whack jobs. “Good luck to you, Ben. And sorry for the detour. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
Ben’s expression turned sour again. “Still don’t get what you’re hoping to accomplish here.” He waved a hand at the boarded-up old theater. “If it’s a hideout you’re after, there’s got to be better places. Not sure you’re even gonna be able to get in there.”
“You got a tire iron or crowbar in your trunk? Anything we could maybe use to pry off those boards?”
“Yeah. And you can have it. But this is suicide. Ain’t many of those things around just now, but could be that’d change in the time it’d take you to get into that dump.”
“It’s a chance we’ll have to take.”
Ben shifted in his seat and swiveled his head side to side for a quick survey of the living dead presence in the vicinity. Still weren’t many around, but a few had turned in their direction and had drawn marginally closer, though the closest was still dozens of yards away.
Now he looked at Brix again. “We’ve got a little leeway here, looks like. A little time. So I’d like to hear the real reason behind this and all the weird shit you’ve been talking. I think you owe me some kind of explanation. And before you say a word, I don’t want to hear anything but the no-bullshit truth. I don’t care how crazy it is.”
Brix exchanged another glance with Jason. He didn’t say anything, but she felt certain his tired, resigned expression mirrored her own feelings. Ben was right. He had saved her life more than once tonight. She owed him an explanation. A true one, even if it accomplished nothing other than confirming his doubts about their sanity.
She glanced through the rear window to appraise the closest zombie. It was a female in a hospital gown and it was still moving at a pace not even a snail would envy. No real danger there. At least not yet.
She looked at Ben. “You remember me talking about my boyfriend back at the bar, right? Well…earlier tonight, like hours and hours ago, we came out here to meet some of his friends for a movie…”