Justin gritted his teeth, nose to nose now with Lynnwood’s former quarterback-turned-vampire. The guy was good at climbing the ranks. He’d give Tom that much. But he was lacking in the brain department. “If you’re going to kill me,” Justin said. “I want one last request.”
“Yeah?” Tom said. “What’s that?”
“Smile for the camera.” Just tilted the weapon back so that the lens was facing upward. He snapped several photos. The flash hit them both, though Tom got the worst of it. Justin’s eyes failed, the world turning bright white. He couldn’t focus on anything, couldn’t see Tom as his face melted away from its skull, as most of his skin spilled onto the floor.
He sensed Tom collapse into a steaming puddle, felt Vickie run to her long-lost lover’s side. “You bastard! What did you do?”
“You used to be smart,” Justin said, his back against the display case. “You should’ve stayed in the honor’s club.” He turned the lens back to its former position and fired off more shots. He wasn’t sure how close Vickie was but judging by her screams and gurgles and, finally, her death rattle, he thought he’d aimed just fine.
Eventually, his eyes adjusted enough to see the remnants of Tom Parkins and Vickie Bronson, no more than stains on the floor now.
They were your classmates. You went to one of Tom’s birthday parties before. And you just killed them.
There wasn’t enough time to think of such things. Later—if there was a later—he could reflect on everything that had happened tonight but right now there were more pressing issues.
In the distance, somewhere deep beneath the school, he thought he heard a scream.
Chapter Thirty-One
Alyssa’s nose flared with pain as she took in a deep breath and choked on something coppery. She spit onto the floor and felt her teeth with her tongue. Many were missing. She’d need replacements for sure. Her senior photos would be atrocious. She felt like crying, wished she could talk to Maggie, perhaps the funniest of her friends, who always managed to make her laugh no matter how dire the situation.
Wait a minute, she thought. Something’s not right.
Her mind caught up with her and she remembered the knives sticking out of Maggie’s abdomen. Then she recalled the car flipping and her nose colliding with the dash and, faintly, being dragged down a long, dark hall.
She opened her eyes. Her face hurt too badly to scream but she did manage a weak murmur that vibrated in the back of her throat.
Her father stood before her, crying like an infant. Part of her was happy to see him alive but the rest of her, the sections of her brain that knew this moment wouldn’t last, made every hair on her arms and legs grow stiff.
Because behind her father was something large and awful, and surrounding them both, was quite possibly every single member of the Lynnwood Vampires. Each of them held flashlights, shining the beams in her direction, like she was the star of some horrible play.
No, she thought. This isn’t a play. It’s a snuff film.
And you’re the star.
“Me,” her father was saying. “Take me. Let her go. It was my fault. She had nothing to do with it. She was just a kid.”
“What’re you talking about?” Alyssa said, wincing. Her jaw felt swollen. She tried to move her arms but found she was paralyzed, held in place by a vamp.
Not just any vamp, she realized as the contorted face peered down at her. It was Busty, though he looked nothing like his former self. “Look who decided to wake up,” he said, his voice just as horrid as the rest of him. She cursed the day she’d agreed to date him. If she hadn’t been so hell bent on shocking her dad and Justin, she wouldn’t be here in this moldy smelling place with these creatures that had once been her peers.
She should’ve stayed with Justin, sweet and funny and damaged Justin who she’d dumped at the worst of times, who she’d given up on when he’d needed her the most. She’d thought she was being brave, sticking up for herself, but now she saw she was just being a bitch.
He’s probably dead now.
She didn’t see him in the crowd. Perhaps they’d already killed him, disemboweled or beheaded him while she was out cold. Or maybe he hadn’t made it out of the crash. She hoped his death had been quick, hated to think he’d suffered even an inkling of pain because of her.
Busty grabbed her hair, his grip so tight she felt countless strands tear free from her scalp. “Take a look at your old man. We want you to know it’s his fault. He’s the reason you’re going to die tonight. That, right there, is a coward.”
“Coward,” the others murmured, including the shape at the end of the hall.
Melvin, she thought. Justin was right. He’s come back and he’s turned into that… thing.
He’d also been right about the cameras.
Cameras!
She looked down and saw her body was free of their straps. She’d lost them when the car flipped. The last bit of hope fled her body like a leaf in the wind.
Or like a piece of the glass that lodged into your brother’s eyes when your father got him killed.
Her stomach heaved at the sound of the internal voice, because it wasn’t her own. It had sounded within her mind—of that she was certain—but it belonged to…
“To me,” Melvin said. “It belongs to me and so do you and your father. And now you’re going to feel the most pain you’ve ever felt.”
“Sweetie,” her dad said. “It’s okay. Look at me. None of this matters. All there is down here is you and me, alright?” She looked long and hard at her father and for the first time in her life, she saw the man that he was, not just her legal guardian but the human behind that façade. Here was a man who’d lost his son, who’d blamed himself for Jeremy’s death. It would’ve been so easy to give up after that but he’d fought, both for her and her mother, and look where that had got him.
She nodded, crying just as hard as him now. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
“Such a touching moment,” Busty said. He pulled her head back further. “Now how about a kiss for old time’s sake?” He bared his teeth like a hissing cat and nearly bit into her face.
Above the chanting and the exhalations and her father’s pleas she heard something else, a faint thud near her feet, like something had dropped nearby.
Her attention was drawn elsewhere as Busty’s teeth neared her flesh.
●●●
The school was alive.
At least that’s how it felt to Justin. The walls and lockers, nearly every inch of which had been tagged with graffiti, images of the thing that surely waited below his feet, seemed to permeate with some energy that made his skin feel like ice.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know where they’d brought Frank and Alyssa. The deep and dark place Tom had spoken of was no doubt the access tunnel. He’d heard plenty of stories of its existence, how it stretched for miles underneath the town. There’d been tall tales of mutant rats and crazed hermits and even a sea serpent, all of which were said to reside there. All of which paled in comparison to what truly lived below the school.
He tried his best to run toward the ROTC storage room. He could see the door, not more than ten yards in front of him, but he was tired beyond description. How much blood had he lost? He wasn’t sure but it was enough to leave a faint trail behind him as he limped. Each step grew tougher on his legs. They felt like jelly, the rest of his body following suit.
The only thing that kept him going were the screams. Those horrible, shrill screams that carried through the halls. In the classrooms he passed, he swore he heard things giggling in the dark at the sound of Alyssa’s cries, things that reveled in pain and sorrow.
He supposed that was the true meaning of a haunting. It wasn’t ghosts or ghouls but pure, unadulterated sadness, a place where hope and happiness had left for good, replaced with a sense of dread so heavy, it could suffocate you if you weren’t careful.
This building, this condemned school that had once housed several hundred stu
dents, was exactly such a place. It had forgotten all about the good times, the laughs that had been shared, the notes that had been passed, instead settling on one particularly terrible occurrence that Melvin wouldn’t let it forget.
The closer he got to the door, the louder the shouts grew. It wasn’t just Alyssa. There were countless voices, echoing something he couldn’t quite make out. They were down there, in the tunnel, in the last place on this planet he wanted to go. It was their meeting place, the perfect location to remain hidden and speak of things best kept out of the sunlight.
He collided with the storage door, lost balance, and tumbled to the floor. His arm exploded with a fresh batch of pain, replacing the numbness. It climbed to his shoulder and neck, forming into a migraine he was certain would crack his skull.
He flipped onto his back and used his feet to guide him to the stairs, where he managed to sit up and scoot down one step at a time, all the while hearing Alyssa’s hoarse voice, dimmer and more defeated with each word. She would be dead soon. He knew it in his bones.
At the bottom of the steps, he hobbled toward the steel door, the entrance to a real-life nightmare that campfire tales surely couldn’t come close to describing. With his good hand, he tried the latch. It felt impossibly heavy. He strained, felt himself losing grip, both on the door and the world. Eventually he heard scraping metal as the latch lifted and the door slowly opened.
He recalled something his father had told him when he was young. The memory seemed so vivid, he wondered if he’d fainted somewhere upstairs and passed into a dream or perhaps even death. When he’d been a boy of six or seven, he’d been sick for nearly a month, a bad case of Mono that had almost kept him back in first grade. The doctors hadn’t been sure of the diagnosis for the first week. His blood work had come back abysmal. The results showed his blood cells were not doing their job. It could’ve been something serious, as in irrevocable disease serious.
His parents hadn’t told him the truth of course but he’d been aware in the way all children seem to know adult things, some psychic ability that left when you hit middle school. The morning of his final doctor’s visit of that week, the one where they’d either receive good or awful news, he’d looked at his father before they got into the car and asked him a simple question, one that made a full-grown man look ready to topple over.
“Daddy, am I going to die?”
Bruce Wright had kneeled down and brushed Justin’s long bangs from his eyes. “What makes you say that?”
Justin shrugged. “Just a bad feeling, I guess.”
“Well, not every bad feeling comes true, does it?”
Justin shook his head, shivered in the breeze. He’d felt cold for days now, the fever refusing to let up.
“I’ve got some advice for you,” his father had said. “I’m not talking little kid stuff either. I mean grown up words of wisdom that I want you to remember. They’ll come in handy. I promise.”
“Okay,” Justin said, zipping his hoodie.
“Sometimes life is a real pain in the ass. Sometimes it comes at you with everything it’s got. But you can’t let it get you down. You have to fight back any way you can. Punch it or kick or stab it if you want but don’t let it win the fight.”
Justin had laughed at the notion. “What about if I throw a grenade at it?”
His father smiled, ruffling his hair again. “That’d work just fine.”
Grenade, he thought a decade later, his father now gone but his words of wisdom just as crucial.
He held up the camera, remembered there was an automatic setting for which Bruce had been fond of. Press it and you’d have the thing firing off hundreds of pictures in the span of seconds. It was annoying to say the least but if you happened to have an aversion to photography, say, like, the creatures down those stairs, it would be deadly.
He raised the camera, feeling for the button. It was on the side somewhere. His finger fumbled as he limped slowly into the tunnel. At the bottom of the steps, he saw a crowd had gathered.
He wound back as best he could, his finger finally finding the automatic setting, and let go, throwing that grenade his father had mentioned straight into what life had hurled his way.
It landed somewhere in the middle of gathering.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Kill me, Frank thought. Kill me now so I don’t have to see another child die.
Not a chance, Melvin spoke into Frank’s mind. Listen to her screams. Don’t they sound wonderful? The perfect sound track to her last moments. I’ll make you watch every second of it. I’ll have them cut off your eyelids if you try to close them. This time, Frank, you won’t be ignoring what’s right in front of you.
He felt Melvin invading his mind, moving through brain waves and memories. For a moment, the tunnel faded away so that he was back in the cafeteria, watching the suicide he’d been forced to relive earlier, except now it wasn’t Melvin holding the gun, but Alyssa.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, ruining her makeup. “Why’d you make me do it, Daddy? Why’d drive me to kill myself? You’re such a terrible father. You let Jeremy die. You tore our family apart. How many awkward silences did we share? How many arguments did we have? This is better for everyone. If I’d lived to be an adult, I would’ve probably ended up worse, a whore with AIDS and an affinity for shooting up. But, really, you should be the one with the gun to your head. You should be the one suffering.” She cocked the pistol, closed her eyes, and fired.
The vision passed and he was back in the tunnel, surrounded by the vamps, all of them chanting now. It reminded Frank of some cannibalistic tribe deep within the rain forest.
Kill her, kill her, kill her!
Busty smiled at Frank, his teeth centimeters away from Alyssa’s cheek.
Melvin giggled. “Here we go, Frank. Enjoy the show.”
Something heavy thudded onto the floor, splashing through a nearby puddle. Frank had just enough time to turn his head toward the sound and see the camera before it went off, snapping photo after photo in quick succession, the flash strong enough to blind him and everyone in the tunnel.
No, that wasn’t exactly true. In between blinking and wincing he saw the others weren’t just blinded. They were weakened, falling to the dampened floor and screaming in agony as if they’d been lit on fire. They thrashed and moaned, reaching for the sky or perhaps their master, to make the pain go away. Their skin began to bubble and pulse, as if there were pockets of air beneath the surface, begging to come loose. Then the skin liquefied, melting away and forming one large, gelatinous puddle in the middle of the floor that smelled of things left to rot. Steam rose from the mess, stinging Frank’s nostrils. If he’d had any food left in his stomach, he would’ve heaved.
He saw Justin in the distance, limping toward them, using the wall to steady himself. The boy’s injury looked bad even from Frank’s position, but he was alive. He’d found a way to defeat the vamps. Frank wasn’t sure how, but the camera was their weakness.
Of course it is, he thought. They want to stay hidden, to live within the shadows. Taking their photo goes against all of that. It immortalizes them, mocks their mission.
It seemed too simple a solution yet the proof was right before his eyes, the lids still very much intact.
Busty held on the longest, fighting his impending death, though he’d since let go of Alyssa. His mouth hung open and he spasmed as if in the midst of a seizure. He fell to his knees, shaking so quickly that Frank’s eyes had trouble keeping up as they continued to adjust from the flashes. Everything was still blurry, faint behind a sheen of white from the camera, which snapped several photos per second. In those flashes, he caught glimpses of Busty, The Boyfriend From Hell, every father’s worst nightmare, as he’d once said, though the reality was far beyond anything he could’ve predicted. The boy who’d torn apart his family, who’d nearly killed his remaining child, begged for mercy as parts of him separated from his body, falling to the floor and becoming mush.
Alyssa
was free now. She felt her head with her hands, both of which came back spotted with blood. There were areas where the strands had been ripped clean from her scalp. That was okay. Hair grew back and wounds healed, no matter how big their scars turned out to be. What mattered most was that she was alive and so was Justin, who had made it to her now. She held on to him for balance, and he did the same, and Frank thought it would take an act of God to tear them apart.
Even the tendrils that had held Frank in place seemed to loosen so that some of the feeling came back into his hands and wrists. Moments later they let go altogether, falling away like dead branches. In their sudden absence, Frank lost his balance, almost toppled to the ground from both the weakness and relief. Alyssa yelled something to him but his ears were ringing. He cocked his head and smiled, mouthed that he loved her.
Pain erupted in his back, as he felt the slimy tendril, no longer wrapped around his body, dig into his skin and make its way out the other side like a worm racing to the soil’s surface. He watched it exit his stomach and slowly grow limp as it too began to die.
He saw Alyssa screaming and Justin holding her back from Melvin’s vile appendage. Good boy, Frank thought. He’d make a fine husband someday. But maybe he was getting ahead of himself.
His senses were fleeing. His body grew numb. His vision darkened. He smelled nothing. Just as the ringing in his ears cut out, just before all sounds faded away, he thought he heard the strangest thing: a child’s laughter, like a small boy who was glad his daddy was home.
Melvin slid his tentacle out from Frank’s midsection, leaving behind a gaping wound.
●●●
“We have to go,” Justin said. Holding on to Alyssa was nearly impossible. She reached for Frank, for her father, whose last breath they’d both just witnessed. This isn’t something you’ll ever forget, he thought. This will stay with you for the rest of your days.
We Came Back Page 25