D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology (22 page)

Instead of in the gym at Carver High School...which was where the couple actually was.

They’d gone to the Horseshoe Inn for a real dinner out—the early-bird special, of course—and they’d probably stop by Gino’s for a slice before they went home, but right now they were dancing, and that was the part that made Kristen feel that they were not just dating but
together
.

The funny thing was that they were actually quite a bit
apart
. Adam was holding his pelvis back and away from her, probably to hide a hard-on. If only he knew. She pulled him a little closer, enjoying the secret thrill of her breasts pressing against his chest. Perhaps taking his cue from this, he relaxed a bit, and let their lower bodies touch.

Yep. Hard-on.

A new, deeper thrill raced through Kristen as she felt it. She took a deep, shuddering breath as—

The slow song ended, replaced by a garish dance beat, and their fellow students rushed back onto the floor. It was like getting dashed with ice water. 

Adam started to pull away, but she didn’t let him go just yet. Starting the evening, she hadn’t been sure that she was ready for this, but now there wasn’t a doubt in her mind.

She pulled him closer, like she wanted one last hug to finish off the slow dance—which was, in fact, true—and murmured, “Adam?”

“Yeah?” he asked, hugging her back.

“Do you want to go to the make-out room?”  

His eyes widened—just a little bit—but the rest of his face stayed very carefully composed. It wouldn’t do to announce to everyone around what was going on. “Sure,” he said casually. “That sounds like a great idea.”

With that, he led her off the dance floor, doing his best to hide his haste as she smiled secretly to herself.

It took a few minutes for them to find a weak point in the dance’s adult supervision, but as soon as they did, they made a dash for it. Around the corner, into the shadows and they were gone. Once they made it to the Lost Hallway, they were safe. 

Back in the Fifties, Carver High School had converted one of its sub-basements into a secondary gym.  Kristen had heard that the ‘underground’ gym was never intended to be permanent, but it was still in use forty years later when a kid died in there in some kind of accident in the early nineties. Kristen had never been able to get the details of the accident—or rather, she’d gotten too many different versions of them—and it was finally closed down, abandoned. Now, all that remained was the Lost Hallway, a forsaken stretch of gray-painted concrete that led down into the darkness where the ‘underground’ gym had been, ending in a double door that was always locked. A deserted place where the dim flickering fluorescents were never replaced and almost never turned on.

What was behind that door now that the gym was deserted? No one knew. Sure, whenever anyone wanted to be
sensible
, they admitted that it was probably just more storage space. But who wanted to be sensible and ruin such an intriguing mystery?

Of course, none of that mattered right now to Adam or Kristen. The only thing that did—the only thing
useful
about the Lost Hallway—was the Make-Out Room. 

The Make-Out Room was a big storage room inside the hallway with a ratty old couch. It was the perfect trysting-place—the door even locked from the inside—the teachers
had
to know about it, but no one did anything. Unless there was somebody already inside, you could always get in. 

There was nobody in there when Kristen and Adam arrived.

Adam closed the door—quietly, carefully—and locked it. Then he hurried across the room to the couch, where Kristen was already waiting with a smile on her face and her arms held out. 

The next few minutes were lost in eagerness, awkwardness, anxiety and pleasure. They pressed close to each other, trying to find room for this arm or that leg. Their tongues wrestled, slipping into one mouth first, then the other. Adam tentatively slipped a hand up under Kristen’s shirt, and she urged him on with a whispered, “Go ahead.”

His hand was hot, heavy and trembling on her breast, and his attempts at caresses were a lot clumsier than her own, yet there was something about having someone
else’s
hands on her and she gasped—

They both froze.

“What was that?” She whispered. 

He shook his head as they both held still, listening. 

The sound that had startled them had been a long, loud creak. Now, instead, they heard strange tapping noises all up and down the hallway outside. It was like giant crabs were walking around. 

Adam made a face that Kristen just barely saw in the dimness.

“What is it?” She asked.

“Someone must’ve seen us come back here,” he said. “Now they’re trying to spook us.”

Kristen was instantly relieved. Students weren’t supposed to be back here—and so couldn’t report them—and teachers wouldn’t be tapping on the walls so much as pounding on the door. Anything else, by definition, didn’t matter.

“So,” she said, grinning up at him. “Are you spooked?”

He looked down at her, seeing her grin as a dull gleam of teeth in the darkness, and realized that his hand hadn’t left her breast the whole time.

“No.”

“Good.”

Adam had just unzipped her jeans, Kristen’s hips were arching up to meet his hand as it slipped into her panties to cup the damp curls of her sex, and she was all but dislocating her wrist to get her hand under his belt to stroke the soft skin of his hard-on when someone began rattling at the doorknob. 

They sprang to opposite ends of the couch, pulling their clothes back into place. In the time it took them to do that—and to remember that the door was locked—the person on the other side gave up on rattling and started knocking. Knocking softly. Whoever it was didn’t want to be heard.

After a second, a whisper replaced the knock, “Hey! Hey, who’s in there?”

Kristen and Adam both stifled groans. Randy Orsen. If there was one classmate who was
guaranteed
to have the story of catching them in the Make-Out Room—complete with leather, whipped cream and farm animals, no doubt—all over the school by Monday, it was Randy Orsen. 

“Room’s occupied, Randy,” Adam said, hoping he was loud enough to be heard by Randy, but too quiet to be heard by anyone else. “Come back later.”

“You gotta let me in, man,” Randy said, starting to twist at the knob again. “You gotta let me in!”

“I said piss off!”

Instead, Randy started pulling and pounding at the door. “I don’t care what you’re doing in there,” he said, his voice rising. “Please, you gotta let me in!”

Adam sprung up off the couch. Kristen hoped that he
would
open the door, and then bust Randy in the nose. Randy was the kind of guy who snapped bras, flipped skirts, depantsed ninth-graders—of both sexes—and generally molested people as much as he could get away with because he thought it was funny.

“Shut up, Randy,” Adam hissed. “You’re gonna get Mrs. Boyanksi over here!”

 “You don’t understand!” Randy shrieked, yanking and hammering at the door so hard the jamb creaked. “There’s something out here and it’s coming and you’ve gotta let me in. Y
ou’ve gotta let me in
—”

Adam was across the room and reaching for the doorknob when something hit the door, rattling it in its frame, and Randy’s scream cut off.

Adam froze. 

“Randy?”

Outside the door, there was a strange sort of gurgling noise, then the same rattle-tap-scrabble they’d heard before.

“Randy?”

Adam started for the door again when Kristen heard the
squip
of his shoe slipping, and saw the shadow of his shape in the darkness crash to the floor. 

She was across the room in a second, kneeling at his side.   

“Are you okay?” She whispered.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so,” he muttered. “I just slipped on something.”

“Still got that mini-flashlight on your keychain?” She asked.

“I didn’t land on it, if that’s what you mean.”

“Here,” she said, holding out her hand. “Let me see it.”

He obliged, handing it to her as he pulled himself up into a sitting position. She, in turn, clicked it on and turned it toward the door.

What she saw turned her blood to icy slush in her veins.   “Oh, God.”

“What? What is it? Oh, fuck!” Adam screamed, scrambling backward and away as he saw what his foot had slipped in. A pool of blood, almost certainly Randy’s, had seeped under the door and was still spreading. 

Suddenly a piercing roar came from the direction of the gym. Both their faces went white. And that was when the screaming began.

***

Kristen didn’t know how long she and Adam sat there on the couch, clinging to each other. The other students’ screams didn’t last long. No one else tried to get into the Make-Out room with them. She was glad about that. They’d hate themselves later for Randy, she knew, but they could at least tell themselves that there was no way they could have known. If anyone else had come knocking at the door afterwards, she didn’t think she’d have been able to open it for them.

Horribly, the music kept playing long after the screams stopped, but then there was a crash and an ear-piercing squeal of static, and that went silent, too.     

“Is it over?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know, and I’m not going out there to find out,” Kristen answered.

“We can’t stay in here forever.”

“We can wait a
little
longer.”

“
How
long? We can’t just sit here all night!”

“Sure we can.”

Kristen could hear the frustration rising in Adam’s voice. She didn’t know if it was courage or panic, but he wanted to move. To do something. The problem was, that meant opening the door to whatever was out there.

“How will we even know when it’s morning?” His last-ditch effort.

“We’ve both got watches.”
Her
last-ditch effort. She wasn’t handling this very well.

“Well, you can just sit here if you want to,” he snapped, “I’m not—”

“Wait!” She said, grabbing his arm. “We’re both being very stupid.” She pulled out her cell phone and flipped it open. Bathed in its blue light, his face looked rather sheepish. Then he frowned, pulled out his own, looked at it, scowled, and turned it toward her. 

No bars.

“We’re sitting at the bottom of a giant cinderblock,” he said. “Guess it’s not very good for reception. So much for that idea.” With that, he turned back toward the door.

At the exact same moment the tapping-tacking-scrabbling  sound came down the hall again, accompanied by a slithery bumping sound. Then silence.

Adam quickly returned to the couch.

Kristen didn’t know how much longer they sat there this time, clutching each other’s hands, eyes useless in the dark room, ears straining for the slightest sound. It could have been minutes or hours. She didn’t check her watch, because she knew that minutes were more likely, and checking would only make time pass even slower. 

So she wasn’t sure how much later it was when Adam finally spoke up again. “You know, I was having a good time…you know, on the date.”

She was glad about that, and she smiled, but she also snorted. “Of course you were,” she said. “You got at least partway into my panties.”

She expected him to get all gallant, say something like: ‘
It wasn’t just that
,’ but he surprised her. “Well, yeah,” he said. “That’s the thing.  I thought that if we did anything, it would be you
letting
me do stuff, you know? Would you let me touch your tits, would you let me get to third base. But you were…really into it. You were actually
participating
. There are times I wonder if girls even
get
horny; but you were right in there like a guy, and I think that’s really cool.”

She smiled again, more genuine this time. “There’s a lot you don’t know about girls,” she said. “We’re just as horny as guys, but it’s easier to hide it...and a lot riskier to let anybody know. Being called a slut sucks, you know? Especially by a guy who said he liked you on Friday night. But I trust you not to do that.”   

“Why?” He asked. “I mean, I’m honored, but why?”

“Because I’ve known you a long time and I know you’re not like that,” she answered. “I mean yeah, you’re my friend, but even if you hated me, you’re a stand-up guy. As much as you hate Lindsey, you don’t help spread those rumors about her having a gangbang with the football team, or her having a night job as a stripper, or her being knocked-up. You don’t use the fact that she has a pussy against her, you know? And if you don’t do it to her, you won’t do it to me.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

They were left in silence again. But this time, the silence seemed to have a different charge. She noticed Adam was huddled closer to her than ever before. Maybe he felt it, too.

“Adam?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want to fuck?” Kristen asked.

“What?”

She could feel him staring at her incredulously in the darkness. “It’s only our second date, so I don’t think I can really call it making love, but we could die any second and we don’t have anything else to do so would you please just fuck me?”

“I...uh...wasn’t expecting...I don’t have any—”

“If we live through this, I’ll get some Plan B! Now come on!
Please
!” Her voice broke on the last word. She hadn’t realized how desperate she was. 

“Okay.”

While Adam fumbled to open his pants, Kristen simply shoved everything below her waist to her ankles, then kicked it off and straddled him.

He was hard. Very. She grabbed his hardness, pointed it upward, fit tip to lips, and slammed down. 

It hurt. A stab, tearing, then burning. She should have been more gentle with herself, but she couldn’t, any more than she could stop now. She rode him hard, and in a minute the burning started to fade, replaced by heat. A minute later, she felt the familiar pressure starting to build in her belly. She’d never come this fast, and probably never would again; she was in a primal fury of terror and need, riding wild, and—