He opened his eyes. Opened his mouth. Felt water touch his tongue. He was lying flat on his back on asphalt. He could feel its rough texture beneath him. He stared up at the sky, at the black clouds drifting high above him, moving fast and occasionally obscuring a luminous full moon.
He sat up, took a look around.
“What the fuck?”
He was in the parking lot outside the theater. He got to his feet and staggered around in a slow circle. The Sunshine 6 was dark. There were no movie titles on the white marquee. The only vehicle in sight was Kira’s silver Hyundai. Every other car, Jason’s Malibu included, had vanished.
His first thought was of Jason Tatum.
Motherfucker put something extra in the punch. Acid or some shit.
How else to explain this?
He heard the sound of an engine approaching. A huge vehicle of some sort came screeching into the parking lot. Its bright headlights pinned him as it rocketed toward him. He held up his hands against the glare and was able to discern the huge outline of a Hummer. It squealed to a stop six feet away and doors on both sides popped open. Two musclebound men clad all in black emerged.
One pointed at him. “Get him.”
Monroe gaped at them. “Whoa. Hey. Just hold the fuck on. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but—”
Both men came at him.
Monroe belatedly realized that full-throttle retreat was by far his best option. He staggered backward a few steps, then turned to flee at full speed, but by then they had him. He struggled against them, but they held on to him with grips of iron. One of the men opened the Hummer’s back door and tossed him inside.
Kira was there.
A man with the coldest, blackest eyes he’d ever seen was seated next to her.
Kira whimpered, her eyes bulging with fear. As Monroe watched in stunned helplessness, the man opened his mouth, displaying elongated incisors.
Fangs…my God, those are fucking fangs.
An animal rumble issued from the man’s throat. Then his head snapped toward Kira’s throat, his fangs ripping into the tender, exposed flesh.
Monroe felt nausea at the sight of the suddenly spurting blood.
Kira’s
blood.
He felt lightheaded again. He pitched sideways in the seat, unconscious.
The door wouldn’t open.
Greg frowned and tried it again.
Same result.
Lashon wasn’t here. He couldn’t understand it. He tried to think. Kira’s Hyundai was outside. That was undeniable. So
she
was here. But perhaps Lashon had changed her mind about coming. Maybe she’d opted to mope around her apartment again instead. It was what she did most days.
Then again…
There was one other possibility. He knew from Lashon’s blog that Kira was seeing the vampire movie first. Perhaps she had decided to stick with her friend and see that one. The prospect of searching another auditorium didn’t excite him. Yet he felt he had to do it.
But this situation with the door was getting in the way.
He reached for the handle again, but this time his hand fell limply upon it and slid slowly off the slick metal. He felt woozy and screwed his eyes tightly shut in time to miss that first flash of blinding white light. When he opened them again, the auditorium doors were still right in front of him, but something was different. He felt sick. Nauseated. But his curiosity overrode these physical symptoms a moment longer. Long enough to peer through the door’s vertical window.
The lobby was dark.
Completely
dark.
He could make out a dim outline of the concessions stand and a portion of the ticket booth. And something was moving out there. A man. Probably one of the weird theater employees. But even this person was just a vague outline, a form that was becoming dimmer with each passing second. Wow. That was just really strange. It was almost as if the world outside the auditorium was…
…fading away.
The world grew fuzzier as he staggered backward down the aisle. So strange. He felt almost high. Stoned. Like he was floating away on a silky-soft white cloud.
There was yet another flash.
And then he felt nothing at all.
For a while.
The first flash of white vaguely troubled Brix. It seemed to originate from nowhere and wasn’t a part of what was unfolding on the screen. The movie was just beginning and what was happening there was happening in near-total darkness. And she had never been to a theater where the house lights would produce that kind of sudden, blinding flash. Given the absence of any logical external source of the light, this left the possibility that it had been triggered by something internal. Something in her brain. Synapses misfiring. That was scary as hell, but when she glanced at Trevor she saw him staring blankly up at the screen, his face twisted in an expression of confusion and worry she suspected mirrored her own.
Her body tensed and all her senses went on full alert. She had shifted into fight mode without even thinking about it. It was the way she’d taught herself to react and it was second nature by now. She had long believed an apocalyptic event of some nature was just around the corner and that it was every right-thinking person’s duty to prepare themselves for survival in a world gone wrong. She had no evidence to indicate anything of the sort was happening now, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t. She thought of her Glock, shut away now in the glove compartment of the F-150. Never in her life had she more wanted to feel its reassuring weight in the palm of her hand.
Trevor looked at her. Opened his mouth to say something.
And that was when the second flash came.
Someone screamed.
As the second flash passed, Brix became aware of a deep wooziness. She also felt mildly sick. Jesus, something was really fucked and wrong about that flashing light.
Need my gun. Got to go…get it…
She tried to stand.
Then the flashing light blinded her again and the world went away for a little while.
Part Two
Feature Presentations
Chapter Seven
But not for long.
Brix also woke up flat on her back in the parking lot outside the theater. But this was not the same version of the parking lot in which Kira and Monroe found themselves after the bright flashes that interrupted the screening of
Blood Lust
. Here it was not raining and there were no vampire predators prowling the area in enormous automobiles.
But that didn’t mean danger wasn’t present.
She heard something strange. A kind of…
groaning
.
Was it Trevor? Was he hurt?
Brix’s eyes snapped open. She saw the dark sky above and knew at once this was no dream or hallucination. Somehow those bright flashes in the theater were connected to her inexplicable relocation to the parking lot. She knew intuitively no one had carried her out here. What had happened was more akin to teleportation. Which was the kind of thing you saw all the time in cheesy science fiction movies, but, so far as she knew, teleportation technology did not actually exist. Or if it did, it was the kind of ultratop-secret Area 51 thing few people knew about. And the government sure as shit would never deploy the technology in a dinky theater in a nowhere town showing cheap-ass horror movies. Unless…
The groaning sound came again.
What the fuck
was
that?
She knew she should get up and check that out. She should also get a fix on Trevor’s location pronto. And she meant to do those things in just a second. But the troubling thought that had flashed through her mind wouldn’t go away. Because maybe a nowhere town was
exactly
the kind of place government black-ops types might decide to conduct risky experiments with potentially hazardous and unpredictable new types of technology and/or weaponry systems.
Shit.
“Brix?”
Trevor!
Brix was up and on her feet in the next instant. She had already locked on the direction of Trevor’s voice and was turning that way when she froze and stared off into the distance. It was nighttime in Murfreesboro. The college town was no Manhattan, but it was a metropolis compared to where she lived. It was big enough that she should see a sea of electric lights in any direction. There
was
light in the distance, random flickers here and there punctuating the darkness, but the source of it was not provided by the power company.
Those were fires burning in the distance.
Fucking
fires
.
Brix gaped at the twisting columns of flame for a long moment.
Holy shit. What the fuck?
“Brix!”
Trevor again, sounding panicked this time.
And then a scream.
Brix gave herself a mental slap.
Get your head in the game, bitch!
She completed the turn toward the sound of Trevor’s voice and got moving. She saw him on the ground some twenty yards from her. It was especially dark in that corner of the parking lot, but she could see that her boyfriend was scooting rapidly backward, desperately trying to get away from a shadowy figure that had emerged from behind a black SUV. The figure took another lurching step toward Trevor, drawing close enough that she could see he was a man attired in a ragged black suit. His hair was a mess and his face looked haggard in the pale moonlight. Some drunk asshole. She wasn’t sure yet why Trevor should be so afraid of someone like that, but he
was
afraid and that was all she needed to know.
This was one lousy drunk who was about to get his ass handed to him.
Hard.
By a
girl
.
That last bit was a point she always relished driving home after dealing with pukes like this. Some people were just in especially dire need of having their egos squashed. Mostly bullies and fake hard-asses. She considered it a public service, like holding doors for people or helping old ladies across the street. Brix moved past Trevor just as he was finally getting to his feet. He clutched at her as she went by, his fingers sliding off the sleeve of her denim jacket. “Brix! Don’t! Stay away from him.”
“Don’t worry, baby. I’ve got this.”
A scream came again. The timbre of it was the same as the previous scream. It had a distinctly feminine quality to it. And now someone else was yelling. A guy. She heard terror in that voice. But she kept her focus on the task at hand. One crisis at a time. She would help those people as soon as she’d dealt with this dumb asshole.
She was very close to him now, mere yards away.
He took another lurching step in her direction.
And…groaned.
Brix frowned, faltering just the slightest bit.
Um…
Yet another lurching step. And now the smell assailed her. How had she not noticed it in the first place? The stench was so foul it made her eyes water. He smelled like a pile of rotting meat left out in the sun all day.
Another staggering step closer.
Almost within kicking distance.
She was maybe letting him get a little too close, closer than she normally would when squaring off for a fight with someone, though she wasn’t overly worried. His gait and his lopsided stance were strong indicators he would be dead meat the moment she went into attack mode. There was a remote chance he was faking her out, but she doubted it. Bottom line, she didn’t perceive this clown as a real threat. And yet, something was very wrong with him. Her curiosity was piqued.
She wrinkled her nose and scowled at him. “Dude. What the fuck? You smell like you slept in a fucking sewer.”
The man’s mouth hung open. It opened marginally wider still and another low groan emerged.
“What was that? Sorry, I don’t speak stupid. Try English, okay?”
Another groan, louder this time.
He lifted a hand, reaching for her. Brix took an instinctive step backward. She didn’t like that. Not at all. It went against everything she believed. Backing down made you look weak. That was a lesson her father had instilled in her at an early age.
Trevor yelled at her again. “Get away from him! Jesus, Brix!”
Another of those instinctive backward steps.
Dammit.
She heard sounds of violence nearby. Heavy thuds. More screams and more yelling. That Nikki chick and her ass-hat boyfriend, she was pretty sure. Obviously, Stinky here wasn’t the only threat in the vicinity. The reality of how much trouble they were potentially in hit home again. Yes, something immensely strange had happened in the theater. But something even stranger was happening out here in the parking lot. She needed to stop trying to figure this guy out. There were bigger mysteries that needed solving.
She squinted at him, the extent of the ragged condition of his clothes becoming apparent for the first time. His suit had been nice once upon a time. But now it was badly stained and torn in many places. He wasn’t in such great shape, either. He was gaunt and his eyes were a strange milky white. And, holy shit, one of his ears was missing. There was an ugly wound where it had been. The really weird part was the wound wasn’t leaking blood.