The Late Night Horror Show (39 page)

Lashon was done playing with the evil bitch. She pounced immediately, straddling her to pin her to the floor as she raised the cleaver high overhead and brought it down with every ounce of savagery she could muster. The first chop split the girl’s face open to the bone. She writhed and screamed, pain galvanizing her as she tried to buck Lashon off her body.
 

But Lashon would not be budged. She brought the cleaver down again, this time slamming it into her throat. The girl’s eyes jittered in their sockets and her body twitched. Blood leaked from the corners of her mouth even as larger gouts of gore spurted from the wound in her throat.

Lashon still wasn’t satisfied.

She chopped at Heidi’s face and throat many more times. By the time she was done, the dead girl’s once very beautiful face was an utter, ugly ruin. Given what she had done to Johnny, this seemed only right. At last, she arrived at a moment where it felt like it was enough. Her rage had been expended. Now she just felt tired. Weary almost beyond reckoning. She tossed the cleaver aside and staggered to her feet.

She turned in a slow circle, taking all the madness in one last time. The bodies hanging from the hooks. The hideous things that had been done to those poor people. The many jars still remaining on all those shelves. Those trophies of horror and atrocity. And, worst of all, Johnny’s poor, violated body sprawled on the cold, hard floor. She went to him and knelt by him to mutter a few words of sincere gratitude for all he had sacrificed.

Then she got up and walked out of there.

She emerged from the house and stood for a time on the long porch, wondering what her next move should be as she watched the first rays of the sun already peeking over the horizon grow brighter. The cooler she remembered from earlier was still propped atop a table in the middle of the porch. She flipped open its top and saw a few cans of beer still floating in cool water. She plucked one out, shook off the excess moisture, and popped the tab.

“Here’s to you, Johnny,” she said, with a slight tilt of the can.

Somewhere a bird twittered prettily. The sound made Lashon smile. There was still beauty in the world, after all. Nothing could ever erase that, including any amount of horror.

Nothing.

She stayed there a while longer, drinking and thinking.

The man who called himself Doctor Ominous was no longer doing his impression of a jolly, delightfully mad evil genius. If anything, his expression betrayed an unexpected shade of sadness as he stared at the corpse slumped in the chair opposite his desk. Greg Nelson had been right, of course. The game had been rigged from the start. Ominous had known precisely how many clicks of the revolver’s trigger would spin the cylinder around to the single live round it contained.

O’Dell cleared his throat. “A-hem. Should I, uh…dispose of the remains?”

Ominous steepled his fingers and kept his eyes on the face of the man who had dared to challenge him. His hands were hanging slack by his sides, but the gun was still wedged inside his mouth. There was a messy spray of blood and brains decorating the middle of the control room, which now no longer resembled the interior of an old-timey train coach. Rarely in his life had the doctor witnessed displays of courage on this level. It was a thing to be admired, no doubt. And yet what had his courage earned the young man? Nothing. Not a damn thing at all.

A shame.

Empathy was an emotion Ominous rarely experienced. He didn’t much give a damn about other human beings. Never had. So it was curious he should feel empathy now, even in light of Greg Nelson’s admirable sacrifice.

And yet…he did.

“Doctor?”

Ominous blinked and gave his head a shake to clear the mental cobwebs. He looked at O’Dell, whose illusory leprechaun appearance was no more. In truth, O’Dell was fair-skinned and stood a few inches taller than six feet. It had amused Ominous very much to craft an illusion so far removed from the man’s reality.

He waved a hand at the dead man. “By all means, dispose of the body. But…” He trailed off, chewing on his bottom lip as he began to entertain a concept so foreign he could scarcely credit it as originating from his own brain. And yet here it was.
 

“Before you do that…” He waved his hand again, this time indicating the screens on the wall. “Reset the continuum. Bring them all back.”

O’Dell’s expression betrayed genuine surprise for a fraction of a second. Then he was all business again. “Of course, doctor. Many of them are dead already, of course.”

Ominous nodded and drummed the tips of his fingers together as he began to swivel back and forth in his chair. “Of course. But bring back the ones still living. And…”

He stopped swiveling and trailed off again.

O’Dell cleared his throat, prompting him. “Yes, doctor?”

“I imagine we could access a plane of existence where another version of Greg Nelson yet lives.”

“Probably.”

“A variation on this world where the difference is so slight as to be negligible.”

O’Dell nodded. “You already know you can do that, doctor.”

Ominous snapped his fingers and sat forward, suddenly more buoyant than he had been at any point since the last moments prior to this Greg Nelson’s demise. “And that is precisely what we shall do! We will bring another Greg Nelson here, dropping him smoothly into the life formerly occupied by
this
Greg Nelson!”

“Right. Um…” O’Dell cleared his throat again, a touch more nervously this time. “To what end, sir?”

Ominous smiled. “I’m feeling magnanimous, O’Dell. A version of Greg Nelson will have a chance to reconnect with his girl. We’ll even tamper with the replacement’s brain a bit, allow him to believe he experienced what this Greg Nelson experienced tonight.” His grin broadened as he warmed to the idea. “Albeit with an alternative outcome.”

The alternative concept that had been niggling at his brain was…mercy.

So truly foreign and strange a thing.

And yet…not without its small pleasures.

He began to rock in his chair again as the Mix of Diabolical Awesomeness shifted to a new song, “Death Comes Ripping” by the Misfits.

The music moved him. It always did.

Stirred the beast, as he’d told Greg Nelson.

He got up and danced around the room, slipping and sliding in the blood and gore.

Out of the darkness and into the light…

Darkness gave way to blinding light as the Firebird blew through the theater’s entrance and passed through what seemed like empty space for a moment—a moment during which consciousness faded and the fabric of reality itself ceased to exist. Then the world coalesced around them again and the car was hurtling through a wide-open white room that bore a passing resemblance to a movie theater lobby. Then the Firebird slammed into an obstruction that had once masqueraded as a movie theater concessions stand and ground to an abrupt halt.

Still rattled by the crash through the theater’s entrance, the three of them looked around at their strange surroundings in dumbstruck wonder.

Then Jason said, “Goddamn. This is like some space odyssey bullshit up in here.”

Ben leaned forward to poke his head between seats. “Please tell me the rest of your world doesn’t look like this.”

Brix shook her head. “I’m not sure this
is
our world.”

Jason turned fully around in his seat and frowned at something.

Brix followed his gaze, shifting around in her seat, too. “Okay. That’s strange.”

Ben took a look as well. “Could someone explain that to me?”

Brix shook her head. “Nope. Not me.”

Jason grunted. “Me, either.”

Though there were signs of damage caused by the Firebird’s careening path through the lobby, the theater’s entrance was intact. But Brix remembered the explosion of glass and wood planks as the front end of the car had gone crashing through. Still, it was impossible to deny the evidence before her eyes.

Then it hit her.

The crash had occurred somewhere else. In that
other
world.

And this thing that had disguised itself as an ordinary-appearing theater was somehow the facilitator. This white austerity surrounding them was the truth beneath the surface, along with its hints of an otherworldly, incomprehensible reality-warping technology.

Brix said, “Guys, I’ve got a great idea.”

Jason looked at her. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Brix tried to start the car, thinking she’d just get it turned around and go crashing through the entrance again. But the engine wouldn’t turn over.

Brix smacked the steering wheel. “Fuck it. Abandon ship.”

They bailed out and commenced a mad dash for the theater’s front doors. Which, astonishingly, were unlocked and yielded easily to their touch.

One moment, they were embracing in the rear compartment of the helicopter as the bird flew off into the deep darkness of the night. Then, a bright flash obliterated the darkness and the next thing they knew they were in the parking lot outside the theater where the whole nightmarish evening had begun.

Monroe recognized at once that they really were back in their own world. And yet things hadn’t simply been reset. He saw other people wandering about the parking lot in a daze. A few of them he recognized from his brief time inside the theater. Strangers who had stood in line with them for tickets and popcorn. Some of them looked like they were in shock. Some were crying. Some were covered in blood. Kira was still wrapped in his arms. Like many of the others, she was blood-drenched.

She was also nude.

She shivered in his arms as she nervously scanned the surroundings. Then she looked at Monroe. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

He nodded. “I know. You can wear my shirt. It’ll be something at least.”

“That’s not what I mean. Look.” She jerked her head in the direction of the brightening horizon. “The sun’s coming up. And we’re still…”

Monroe was confused for a moment.

Then awareness dawned.

Shit. She’s right.

“We’re still vampires.”

It was true.

Everything that had happened over in that other world actually
had
happened. They had become vampires there and so they still were here.

Kira clutched at his shirt. “I don’t want to burn. I don’t want to die, Monroe.”

“We’re not gonna burn. I promise.”

There had to be a car somewhere nearby they could steal. Kira’s car was here, but it was useless for now, as her keys were still back in that other world. So Monroe scanned the parking lot again, searching for a likely victim. After a moment, he spied someone perfect, a very woozy-looking middle-aged man in a ragged-looking T-shirt attempting to open his crappy Dodge Neon.

He took Kira by the hand and led her in that direction.

“Come on,” he told her. “We’ll catch a ride to my place and have a drink along the way.”

She smiled at this and clutched his hand tighter.

“This will be fun,” she said, almost cheerily. “We’re probably the only real vampires in this world. There probably aren’t even any hunters to worry about.”

Monroe thought she was probably right. This
would
be fun. The future suddenly seemed very bright indeed. Or, he reflected with a smile, as bright as it could for creatures who would have to spend the remainder of their very long undead existences living under the cover of the night.

Most of the Late Night Horror Show survivors had already wandered off by the time Lashon rematerialized in the parking lot outside the theater. Though she would never realize it, there had been a slight delay in her return to her proper world. A delay necessitated by certain arrangements that had to be made.

There was just one other person there to commiserate with upon her return, a slightly plump woman in her thirties who claimed to have survived a wild night of being chased around by flesh-eating zombies. Lashon had no reason to doubt the tale. She and the woman wound up being the only two witnesses to the ultimate fate of the Sunshine 6 cineplex. Or, rather, what appeared to be its fate.

The woman frowned as she puffed on a cigarette. Lashon thought it odd she’d somehow held on to her smokes through a zombie apocalypse, but she guessed she’d seen stranger things over the course of the last dozen hours.

She realized she sort of wouldn’t mind a smoke herself and said so. “What is it? Something wrong? Something else, I mean.”

The woman tapped a cigarette from a nearly empty pack and passed it to Lashon. “The theater…” She nodded in its direction. “Is it sort of…
glowing
?”

Lashon turned to look at the building.

It wasn’t glowing. Not exactly.

No.

It was…shimmering. Turning translucent. Fading in and out of existence. Or just turning invisible. Or just going somewhere else. Somehow.