The Late Night Horror Show (18 page)

“Is that what you want? Really? To become a fucking monster?”

“It’s the only way.” Her voice remained resolute even as her bottom lip trembled. “I don’t want to…cease to exist. I can’t bear it. Please. Do this for me.”

“What did I tell you about begging?”

She made an exasperated sound. “I don’t care anymore. Kill me.
Turn
me. If you’re really serious about helping me, you’ll do it.”

Monroe stared at her in stunned silence for many long moments. Then he shrugged. “Listen…I only just became a vampire. I didn’t know I was one until I woke up here. I’ve never drunk anyone’s fucking blood before, much less turned anyone. I don’t know how to do it.”

Marnie pushed away from the corner, stood up, and approached him. She came as close as the length of the chain allowed. “Just do it. I figure it’s gotta be instinct, right? Decide you’re gonna bite me and turn me. Just do it.”

She lifted her chin and tilted her head to one side, extending her neck to the farthest extent possible.

Fuck.

Monroe didn’t want to do it. What she suggested was crazy. And yet…she was sort of right, wasn’t she? There really was no other way, at least none that was obvious. He stared at the beating pulse in her neck and felt his arousal return.

Let instinct take over. Just do it.

Marnie’s eyes rolled toward him as she kept her neck extended. “Do it. Kill me. Turn me. And then fuck me after if you want.”

Her last statement crushed what remained of his resistance and inflamed the resurgent cravings. His mouth snapped open to an unnaturally wide degree as he came at her and tore into her delicious neck. The blood spattered his face and filled his mouth with warmth. She screamed once and then sagged against him as he drank greedily and snarled and writhed against her. Drinking her blood and feeling her life force begin to fade was the most exhilarating thing Monroe had ever experienced.

He felt exultant.

Somehow more alive than ever, despite technically being dead.

And he kept drinking from her tender, cooling flesh until she was dead, too.

Second Intermission

The door swung shut behind him as Greg Nelson eased out into the hallway. The way to his right led to more auditorium doors. Clearly not the way to go. Or was it? He frowned as he reexamined his options. He’d set out with the intent of heading straight for the front doors of the cineplex. After all, the obvious way out was the way he had entered the place. But maybe it would be smarter—and safer—to seek a rear exit. The lobby and concessions area had a lot of open space. He thought of how exposed and vulnerable he would be if he went that way. His heart began to race faster as he imagined it, a fresh surge of panic threatening to overwhelm him until he was able to coax himself back to an acceptable level of calm.

Once he had himself under control again, he crept quietly to the other side of the hallway and put his back to the wall. He again glanced in each direction. There was still no indication of alien presence either way. That the strange theater workers were aliens remained his working theory. It was, he was certain, a reasonable assumption, given the evidence all around him. The translucent floor panels beneath him were identical to the ones in the theater aisles. He frowned again at the diffused light making the circuit from one end of the hallway to the other and back again, over and over. He wondered whether there might be aliens somewhere beneath him, maybe looking up at him right now.
 

A disturbing possibility occurred to him. Perhaps observation and study of his actions as he attempted to extricate himself from this situation was an integral piece of some fucked-up alien experiment. And the whole thing with the movies was only a component of something larger. He hoped not. Because it would likely mean he had no real chance of escape at all. And it would mean that to them he was little more than a dumb lab rat struggling to make his way through an impossible maze. The scenario seemed all too plausible.

Okay,
he told himself.
Okay. It doesn’t matter whether they’re watching you. Or whether you’re caught up in some weird experiment. You’ve got no control over that. You don’t even know if it’s true. Either way, it doesn’t change what you’ve got to do. Get out of here. Or die trying. Pick a direction and
GO
!

A smart idea, no doubt, but Greg made himself stay where he was a bit longer as he tried to logically weigh the pros and cons of either heading toward the lobby or seeking a theoretical rear exit. A rear exit might not exist at all. Yes, in a real cineplex there would be one, but this was not a real cineplex. There
might
be a rear exit anyway, but he couldn’t take it for granted. Yet that didn’t mean he had to go charging into the lobby heedless of any potential danger lurking there. There was another option.

Calm,
he thought.
Calm.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Center yourself.

There.

Now
GO
!

Keeping his back to the wall, Greg began to move slowly in the direction of the lobby, sidestepping carefully to avoid a potentially catastrophic stumble. As he neared the end of the hallway, he glanced back the way he had come and saw nothing to alarm him. He was still alone. And though it was hard to trust the impression, it was beginning to feel like the whole place was empty of any other living presence, alien or human. Other than the dim hum of the strange machinery beneath the floor, the only other audible sound was that of his own breathing.

The end of the hallway was only a few steps away now. He reached the edge of the wall and turned slowly to peer around the corner with one eye. His lungs expelled a tremendous breath. It was the loudest sound he’d made since exiting the auditorium. He simply couldn’t help it. There was no one in the lobby. No one he could see anyway. He supposed it was possible aliens were hunkering down behind the big white block that had been the concessions stand—or were crouched down inside the nondescript four-sided cubicle that had been the ticket booth—just waiting for the right moment to spring up and scare the ever-living shit out of him.

Well…it was possible. Hell,
anything
was possible. If he had learned nothing else tonight, he had sure as shit learned that. But, whatever. This was his best shot at getting clear of this craziness. Back to normality. Back to the real world…or at least back to a world that made sense to him, unlike this freaky phony cineplex.

There was no real choice here.

He pushed away from the wall and stepped into the lobby. His whole body was shaking now with live-wire energy. This lasted until he advanced past the concessions stand and reached the middle of the lobby. Nothing was happening. No alarms were going off. No aliens were racing after him to seize him and drag him off to some nightmarish anal-probe chamber of doom.
 

So he stopped and turned in a full circle to stare in wonderment at the empty lobby. He knew he should be running for the door while he had the chance, but some strange impulse compelled him to stop a moment to take it all in.
 

A bank of video games had stood against the far wall opposite the concessions stand. But, like everything else, the video games had been false impressions. Illusions. In their place stood tall booths, oddly similar in appearance to the games they had mimicked. The booths were molded shapes protruding seamlessly from the walls, similar to the way the theater seats had seemed as one with the floor. Each booth was outfitted with screens and a white control panel. Each control panel had a single toggle control and a surrounding set of buttons. On the screens odd and colorful geometric patterns swirled against a sea of darkness. Again, Greg was reminded of the theater, this time of the strange patterns he had seen on the “movie” screen. Only, this wasn’t quite the same. It was more random. The shapes, stranger.

He wanted very much to take a closer look.

To maybe play with the controls and see if anything happened.

But then his common sense kicked in. The impulse was a lunatic notion. Probably nothing would happen. But maybe something would. Possibly something very bad. This was alien technology. Messing with it couldn’t produce any good result and might even raise the alarms he’d been fearing.

So he turned away from the bank of strange machines and headed straight for the front entrance. No more fucking around. The sooner he got out of here, the fucking better.
 

He was there in a matter of seconds and pressed his hand against a white bar in the middle of one of the doors, pushing on it carefully, a considerable part of him expecting it to be locked down tight. Surely it wouldn’t yield easily to a simple touch. Getting out of an incomprehensibly advanced alien facility or ship couldn’t be so easy.

Except that it was.

The door opened smoothly and Greg stepped out into the crisp night air.

Chapter Sixteen

Brix came out of the kitchen after spending some time poking through the drawers and cabinets and saw Jason standing in the middle of the living room. He had his chin cupped in one hand and was staring thoughtfully at the mysterious word spray-painted on the chipped and filthy drywall. It was an oddly thoughtful pose for someone with such a self-consciously snide and tough exterior. She walked over to where he was standing and turned toward the wall to ponder the word herself.

PARTHENOGENESIS

An earlier search of the kitchen had turned up a box of cheap candles and matches. Several candles blazed now in equally cheap plastic holders arrayed around the filthy living room. The candles provided ample illumination, but Brix had fretted some over whether the light might draw unwanted attention from zombies staggering through the street outside. Yet no one, herself included, wished to stumble around half-blind in the dark.

Jason grunted. “That word. It rings a fucking bell. It’s driving me a little crazy.”

Brix nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

They looked at each other, made lingering eye contact for a long moment that soon turned uncomfortable. Brix forced her gaze in another direction after she felt a faint flush touch her cheeks. There was a strange little spark of something between her and Jason now. Nikki was a bitch of the highest order, but that didn’t mean she was dumb. She’d picked up on it right away, long before Brix had even sensed it or been able to acknowledge it herself. A lot of it undoubtedly had a lot to do with Jason being the only other person in their group able to pull his shit relatively together right from the outset of all this craziness. It was situational and didn’t mean anything deeper.

Trevor was standing over by one of the windows at the front of the house. He had a finger hooked around the edge of one of the thin bed sheets they’d pilfered from the bedrooms to use as makeshift curtains. He was staring out at the street with a slack expression that could have been the result of either delayed shock or exhaustion.

Brix moved away from Jason and approached her boyfriend. “Anything happening out there?”

Trevor kept peering through the little gap between the edge of the bed sheet and the window frame. “I saw a couple of zombies go by. Didn’t even look this way.”

“Well…that’s good.”

“Yeah.”

Brix stepped closer and put a hand against the middle of his back. She pressed a side of her face against his shoulder. “I think we got far enough ahead of that pack that they lost our scent. Or whatever. If we stay quiet in here, we might be able to hole up until we can come up with a long term plan.”

Trevor shifted backward slightly, settling against her.

It felt nice.

But then he made a sound of frustration that was close to a whimper. It broke the pleasant spell of intimacy. Trevor turned away from the window and looked her in the eye. “A long term plan? Really?” He laughed, but the sound was strained, evoking desperation more than humor. “Come on, Brix. You’ve seen the way it is out there. The world’s in flames. It’s just like in all your fucking movies you love so much. The world is
over
. What kind of long term plan fixes that? How can we hope to survive more than a day at a time?”

Brix was a little taken aback and was trying hard not to show it. It was one of the few times he’d ever spoken so harshly to her. She took care to remind herself that he’d been through a lot and was just exhibiting predictable symptoms of stress. She couldn’t blame him for it and she certainly couldn’t reply with reciprocal harshness. She had to project a sense of calm and steadiness. And hope he could connect with that and draw power from it. From her.

She clasped hands with him and said, “Look, you’re right. I know. It looks bad. Really bad. But we don’t know all the facts about what happened here yet. For all we know, this is a localized incident. And even if it isn’t, there are things we can try.”

“Like what?”

She nodded at the window. “There are other cars out there. A lot of them. We can jumpstart one of them, maybe, and—”

Another of those strained laughs from Trevor. “So now you’re a car thief? Do you even know how to jumpstart a car?”

Jason loudly cleared his throat and spoke up. “I do. But they gotta be older models, like from twenty years ago or earlier.”