Melissa looked at him. “Right. Come on then. We’ve got killing to do.”
They walked out of the club.
Third Intermission
Greg stood on the sidewalk outside the cineplex and scanned the parking lot. He saw the same smattering of cars he remembered from prior to entering the theater. There were maybe a few more now, but overall it had been a sparsely attended night at the horror festival. Which was a blessing of sorts, as it meant only a few dozen people—at most—got sucked into this alien death machine masquerading as a decaying cineplex in a moderately bad section of an unassuming little college town.
Yeah.
Only a few dozen people…and one of them is Lashon.
Rather than departing immediately—as he knew he should—he remained on the sidewalk a while longer, staring out at the street beyond, watching the headlights of occasional cars go zipping by in either direction. He thought about the people in those cars and couldn’t help marveling at how oblivious they were to the astonishing, horrifying thing happening in the middle of their town. Not one of them would ever suspect something so fantastic and insane could be happening right under their noses. And he could never tell anyone about it. They would think he was crazy. Or, even worse, the wrong person might get wind of his tale and he’d find himself being interrogated by black-suited men from some shadowy government agency.
No. No way. Fuck that.
For better or for worse, his lips were sealed forever. He’d be taking this secret to his grave. He stepped off the curb and started across the parking lot toward his car. The sooner he was in it and speeding away from all this weirdness, the better. His thoughts were on the nearly full bottle of Jameson waiting for him in a cupboard back at his apartment when he was stopped in his tracks by a stray memory of Lashon.
It was from last year. From before things started go bad. Before she began to get so stressed out by everything. It was his birthday. She had taken him on a seemingly aimless ride out to the country. It was a pleasant enough excursion along winding rural back roads and would have sufficed as a kind of birthday treat in and of itself. He had enjoyed her company that much back then. Just being with her was always enough.
But Lashon had more in mind that day than just a pleasant drive through idyllic countryside scenery. Just as he had become certain they had reached the official exact center of Absolutely the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, she took a detour down yet another side road. As they came around a bend in the road, the shroud of trees parted and he got his first look at the Starlite Drive-In.
It was an outdoor movie theater, the kind his father talked of so glowingly when he was in one of his nostalgic moods. Only weeks earlier, Greg had told Lashon about that, mentioning how he had never been to one himself and then going on to say how sad it was there were so few of them left these days. And evidently she’d remembered.
He’d had a big grin on his face as they pulled up to the ticket booth. “Holy shit! I can’t believe this. Where’d you hear about this place?”
Lashon was smiling, too, as she paid for their tickets and drove on through. “The
Scene
.” The
Scene
was the local free “alternative” paper. “Article last week about it. Thought right away about your dad’s drive-in stories.”
“And you didn’t say a word.”
“You have no idea how hard that was, boy-o. You better appreciate this.”
He did.
They watched two movies that night. Second-run horror films. Pretty good ones, too, unlike the low-budget pieces of garbage at tonight’s horror festival. But the movies were a secondary pleasure that night. Then, it was all about the setting, which for him was exotic. They munched popcorn and enjoyed each other’s company. An epic makeout session led to lovemaking in the backseat.
“The best night of my life.”
Greg grunted.
So now I’m talking to myself. Great. I’m crazy. Obviously.
As further proof of that, he turned around and started back toward the theater. He was going back inside. The decision had been made at a subconscious level, powerful instinct driving him back the way he’d come before he was even fully cognizant of what he was doing. His conscious mind caught up to what was happening seconds later, but even then his stride did not falter.
He wasn’t scared. Not really. Not anymore. This was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. He loved Lashon. Even after all that had happened, that was the truth and he couldn’t just leave her to a fate like this. Probably it was already too late to help her. And probably the only thing he’d wind up accomplishing here would be to disappear or get himself killed.
So be it.
It was the right thing to do. He had to
try
.
He stepped over the curb again and crossed the sidewalk to the theater entrance. After only the briefest hesitation, he pushed the door open and stepped inside again.
The interior of the place remained the same austere all-white. He was mildly surprised it had not reverted to an illusory facsimile of a real cineplex lobby. It seemed sort of reckless on the part of whatever beings operated this strange facility, as did leaving the door unlocked. This posed troubling questions without obvious answers. Rather than pondering them any further, Greg began an exploration of the faux-lobby.
The plain white cubicle that had been the ticket booth was almost entirely featureless, with the exception of a thin slot in the front panel. The movie tickets had been dispensed through that slot, but a glance at the underside of the panel only deepened the mystery.
He saw no device through which tickets would have been printed and fed. Frowning, he reached into his hip pocket to retrieve his own ticket. His frown deepened as he examined the blank white stub. He clearly remembered words imprinted on that stub, but it now appeared that had also been only illusion.
He tried to conceive of technology sufficiently advanced to alter his perceptions to that degree and failed. And it struck him again how completely out of his depth he was here. He understood none of what was happening on any level and couldn’t fathom how he might even begin to unlock the puzzle of this place.
But that didn’t mean he was giving up. He had committed to a course of action and he meant to see it through to the bitter end. A check of what had been the concessions stand revealed more of the same strange featurelessness. There was no popcorn maker. Yet he remembered people in their seats gobbling popcorn as clearly as he remembered the words printed on his now-blank ticket.
So strange.
Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
Greg’s attention was next drawn to the several tall protrusions jutting from the wall where the row of video games had once stood. He crossed the lobby to stand before one of the protrusions and stared at the strange pattern dancing across its black screen. He watched the colors swirl, coalesce, and break apart again before shifting his attention to the control panel in front of the screen. A single white toggle control and four white buttons arrayed around it.
Not knowing what else to do, Greg grasped the toggle and twitched it to the left. Nothing happened. He twitched it to the right. Still nothing happened. Still grasping the toggle, he started tapping the buttons with his other hand.
Greg gasped as the floor beneath him abruptly lurched.
And then he was descending.
Startled, he turned in a shaky circle and saw that he was sinking into the floor. The panel he was standing on had detached from the others and was lowering itself toward some underground chamber. Instinct made him slap his hands against the nearest adjacent panel. The coward in him wanted only to crawl up out of this hole that had appeared from nowhere and then get out of this fucking place.
But then he thought of Lashon.
And that magical night at the drive-in.
He let his hands slide away from the panel as he continued his descent into the unknown and the darkness below.
Somewhere beneath him he heard a faint sound of music playing.
Something he recognized.
Is that…Shriekback?
Chapter Twenty-Two
The interior of the bar was shrouded in oppressive gloom. Flickers of candlelight were visible through grime-smeared windows as a big, bearded man in a novelty tuxedo T-shirt hustled Brix and Jason through a small billiards room adjacent to the bar proper.
Brix took immediate note of three other people sitting in booths as they entered the bar. There were three rows of booths. Two stood back to back in the center of the main room, while the third lined the nearest wall.
One other person—a lean female with short, bristly hair—sat cross-legged on the floor between the rows of booths. The girl on the floor wore black jeans and boots and had several piercings to go with the multiple tattoos visible on her bare arms. She glanced up at them as they came in, her features twisting in a scowl.
“Nice going, Ben. You should have locked the fucking door.”
Brix was taken aback. “The hell is your problem? We almost got killed out there.”
The tattooed girl unfolded herself and rose smoothly from the floor. She approached Brix and stood toe-to-toe with her. “You think I give a shit? What’s two more dead people in a world full of them? What I give a shit about is the fact that you drew that crazy fucker’s attention back our way after two days of peace. He’ll be taking potshots at us all night and it’s your fucking fault, bitch.”
Brix gaped at her for a moment, unsure of how to respond. Part of it was that the girl was a good three or four inches taller than she was. And she was leaning in toward her and glaring down. The spell was broken only when Brix realized how deliberate and self-aware an intimidation attempt this was. The chick knew her height advantage alone would cause most other females to wilt under the pressure. And Brix had noted that everyone else in the room was male. She sensed instinctively that this lanky rocker chick had relished being the only girl in this little group of survivors.
So Brix smiled brightly and said, “Back off, skank.”
Now it was the rocker chick’s turn to gape in silent surprise. It was a deeply satisfying thing to see. But Brix gave her credit for a quick recovery. “The fuck did you just call me?”
“You heard me. And I don’t like repeating myself. So, unless you feel like eating some of your fucking teeth, I suggest you…back…the…fuck…off.
Now.
”
The girl took a swing at her. It was a roundhouse punch thrown with no precision at all. Brix deflected the blow with ease and delivered a solid punch of her own that slammed into the soft flesh beneath the girl’s sternum and nearly lifted her off her feet as it propelled her backward. Most of the men present—save for Jason and a heavily tattooed, long-haired dude sitting in one of the booths who looked like rocker chick’s male counterpart—let out startled shouts and rushed to the girl’s aid as she tumbled to the floor.
She angrily shoved them away and got quickly back to her feet. Brix was certain she detected a newfound respect in her expression. The girl put a hand to her sternum and winced. “You’ll get yours, bitch. Just watch.”
The bearded man who’d let them into the bar laid a hand on her shoulder in an attempt to placate her. “Come on, Dee, just chill, okay?”
Dee shrugged his hand away. “Keep your hands to yourself, Ben, and do the same with your worthless fucking advice.”
She dropped into the nearest booth and slid sideways, all the way to the back, along the leather-upholstered bench. “You’ll all see,” she said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes resting next to an overstuffed ashtray. “These twats will be the death of us.”
Jason snorted. “I resent that. I’m a prick, not a twat.”
This earned some genuine-sounding laughter from the other men in the room. Brix was glad to hear it. Some of the tension that had been building abruptly evaporated.
The tattooed guy—who was seated in the booth next to the one occupied by Dee—looked at Jason and lifted his chin. “You’re bleeding, dude.”
Jason glanced at his creased bicep, which was indeed leaking, though the wound didn’t look very deep. “Just a flesh wound. I’ll live.” He shrugged. “Or I won’t. Doesn’t really matter much either way at this point.”
Ben tapped Jason on the shoulder and moved past him toward the bar. “You may have a point there, son, but let’s patch you up anyway.”
Jason glanced at Brix, shrugged again, and followed the big man. “Try not to beat everyone up while I’m gone.”
Brix smirked. “Can’t make any promises.”
Dee laughed. “That what you told your daddy when he asked you to stop sucking cock for a living?”
The tattooed guy and the other men present groaned in unison. Instead of snapping off an immediate retort, Brix dropped into Dee’s booth across the table from her.
Dee frowned and blew out a puff of smoke, aiming it at Brix’s face. “Go away.”
“No. What’s your problem anyway?”
“Already told you. Now fuck off.”
Brix reached for the open pack of Marlboro menthols. “You mind?”