The guy looked sort of…
dead
.
Like a—
No. Shut up, Brix. That’s crazy. You’ve seen too many bad movies, that’s all.
Still…
The man who looked like a walking dead thing took yet another staggering step toward her. Brix now stood frozen in place, gawping at the lurching impossibility right in front of her. Trevor grabbed her by an arm and tried to jerk her backward. She yelped and yanked her arm free. She opened her mouth to say something, but the words went unsaid as she sensed something rushing toward her from the right. She tensed, bracing for a collision or a blow, but neither came.
Jason Tatum appeared in front of her, wielding a heavy, old-fashioned tire iron. His arms were already in motion, swinging the length of heavy metal straight at the head of the rotten-smelling, one-eared dude. Brix flinched in anticipation of the sure-to-be devastating blow. Punches and kicks she understood. They were how you fought and defended yourself against bad guys. Unless they were armed, which this guy wasn’t. But this was something else altogether. This was assault with murderous intent. The tire iron connected with devastating force, cracking the man’s skull and sending him toppling to the asphalt. Jason then fell atop him and shifted his grip on the tire iron before raising it high above his head.
It came down again.
And again.
The sound of cracking bone was sickening. He was pulverizing the poor bastard’s skull. It freaked her out. She was witnessing a murder. She wasn’t a stranger to violence, but this shit was on a level beyond anything in her experience.
Except…was it really murder?
Jason got to his feet again, rounding on Brix with eyes wide from adrenaline. “The fuck is up with you?”
Brix was embarrassed by how ineptly she had handled the situation. She covered this by reacting with hostility of her own. “The fuck’s up with me? The fuck’s up with
you
? I didn’t need to be rescued by your sorry ass.”
“Didn’t look that way to me.”
Brix fumed. She curled her hands into tight fists. “I would’ve handled it.”
“Right. Whatever. Looked to me like you were about to be zombie dinner.”
Zombie.
So there it was. The word some reflexive part of her subconscious hadn’t allowed her to acknowledge until now. Maybe because doing so meant being forced to acknowledge something far more disturbing. More disturbing even than the possibility of having stumbled into a government experiment with teleportation technology. Not just more disturbing, but far weirder. She couldn’t begin to fathom how it had happened, but she could no longer deny it—reality itself had been inverted.
Or this was some kind of different version of reality altogether.
A world where…
Her shoulders sagged and her hard expression melted away. “Fuck.”
She shook her head and turned away from Jason to stare at the darkened movie theater. A theater that, in this world, had never played host to a festival of cheap horror flicks. It was a boarded-up, abandoned wreck of a place. Just one more dead thing in a dying world. She stood still and let it all fully register. The smells. The fires in the distance. Rubbish and (probably) piles of bodies burning. Other hints of death and decay. And there were more groans out there. More
hungry
groans. She could see more shadowy figures shuffling toward them. A dozen. Two dozen. Maybe many more.
She laughed, but it was a bitter sound. A hopeless sound. “Fuck.
Fuck.
”
Trevor tentatively touched her shoulder. “Brix? What is it?”
She turned to look at him. She glanced at Jason. Nikki was beside him now and his arm was around her slender shoulders. His look of wired hostility was gone. She acknowledged this with a terse nod, knowing somehow that he understood what she knew as well.
She shook her head. “This is so fucked. So many years of fantasizing about this shit and here it is. Goddamn.”
Trevor frowned. “What are you saying?”
Brix’s expression sobered as she again looked directly at the guy she loved. The guy she would now have to fight tooth and nail to protect if they were to have any hope of survival. “We’re in the movie, baby. We’re in fucking
Rise of the Dead
.”
Chapter Eight
The first thing Lashon Miller was aware of was being wet all over. Droplets of rain pattered her face. She opened her eyes and saw a night sky filled with huge, dark clouds. A flash of lightning followed an ominous rumble of thunder. She dimly recalled checking the forecast before heading out for the evening. There had been no suggestion of thunderstorms. It was supposed to have been a clear, warm night. Instead, she was soaked and shivering. Other odd things penetrated as her head cleared and she became more aware of the world around her.
Things such as the odd abundance of tall trees everywhere she looked.
Lashon sat up and drew her knees toward her chest. She sat there rocking and shaking on the soggy ground, her head turning this way and that as she searched the small clearing she was in for clues as to how she had wound up here.
But there was nothing.
Just a lot of trees and that creepily impenetrable darkness beyond them.
The last thing she remembered was being at the theater. Had someone abducted her from there and brought her to this place? Maybe. She had been in attendance at a lurid movie about a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Maybe one of the guys in the audience was a for-real psycho. He had spotted her and hadn’t been able to help himself. He snatched her, somehow spirited her out of the theater, and brought her to this wooded locale. The perfect place to have his perverted way with her. To rape and murder her. To butcher her body the way he’d seen so many of his favorite movie killers do it to all those pretty actresses.
Thunder crashed above her again, making her flinch. A subsequent burst of lightning, far brighter than the first, lit up the sky.
Lashon sucked in a sharp breath.
The flash at the theater.
That weird grinning dude in the bow tie.
She remembered it all now. She hadn’t been abducted. Not in any normal-world sense, anyway. Something very wrong and very strange had happened in that theater. Something connected with those blinding white flashes. Those weird theater workers, all of them so nearly identical to each other, were somehow responsible for this. She couldn’t begin to understand how that was possible, or even what the larger implications of it might be, but she knew in her gut it was the truth.
Just as she knew the theater workers hadn’t actually been human. She didn’t know
what
they were, but she knew that. And did it really matter? They were weird and dangerous. Those were the only relevant facts, in her view. And whatever had happened, at least one good thing had come of it.
She was nowhere near any of those weird bow-tie-wearing fucks or their dumpy, run-down theater.
Which nonetheless left her with the reality of figuring out where she was and doing something about it. The sooner the better, too.
Now
, in fact, would be a good time.
She uncrossed her arms, braced her hands on the wet ground, and got unsteadily to her feet. Once she was upright she crossed her arms again, hugging her body as tightly as she could as she continued to shiver. She did a slow turn in the clearing, looking for any indication of a good direction to begin her journey out of this godforsaken place. She scanned the ground for signs of tracks in the muddy earth. If someone had carried her to this place and then walked back out of the clearing, there should be ample evidence of that, but there were no footprints anywhere, at least none that were visible here in this deep darkness. It was almost as if some unknowable power had scooped her up and set her down in this place. A crazy notion, maybe, but it would account for the lack of tracks in the wet ground. And the idea was impossible to dismiss, given the profoundly odd nature of the things she remembered from the theater.
She thought yet again of the theater workers. Those mysterious creatures wearing their masks of false humanity. Who and what were they? Where did they come from? What were they trying to accomplish by doing what they had done?
Questions without answers. At least for now. And maybe for always. She could live without answers, if she could somehow manage to get home and survive this night.
And if I can do that,
she thought,
I’m never going to a goddamn horror movie ever again.
She thought about that a moment longer and amended the resolution to include any movie of any type. Why take chances? She preferred books, anyway.
There was a spot at the edge of the clearing where there was a larger-than-usual gap between two of the tall trees. Might a path back to something resembling civilization lie within the darkness beyond that gap? Maybe. Maybe not. Lacking any other obvious options, it was as good a place to start as any. She started toward the gap, but had taken no more than two steps when she heard the first heavy footfall directly behind her. The sound pinned her to the spot for a moment, making her heart race madly while she waited to hear the sound again, praying all the while it had only been her imagination the first time.
But then she heard another heavy footfall. Closer now.
And something else—the sound of heavy breathing. But it was a muffled sound, as if it was coming from behind a…mask?
Her heart hammered even harder at the thought. And though the rational part of her brain knew the only sensible thing was to take off running right then and there, something more primal within her caused her to turn around and take a look at the person stalking her.
A thing she recognized as a massive mistake an instant later. She screamed and staggered backward, nearly tripping over her feet as the soles of her shoes sank into the soft, yielding ground.
The man standing perhaps six feet from her was tall and powerfully built, hugely muscular beneath dirty overalls and a sopping-wet flannel shirt. A bland white mask obscured his face.
The mask reminded her vaguely of those worn by killers in several horror movie franchises. The kind with sequels nearly numbering in the double digits. But this mask was really the kind worn by imitation killers in the even cheaper knockoffs of those more successful movies. While there was nothing distinctive or very noteworthy about it, it would subtly remind audiences of iconic horror villains, a subliminal marketing tactic that might bring in just enough suckers to help make back the film’s undoubtedly miniscule budget.
This mask, in fact, looked very much like the mask worn by the killer in
Chainsaw Maniac
. She had seen images from the movie on the horror festival’s website while idly checking it out on Kira’s iPad. Even more disturbing, however, was the chainsaw gripped in the man’s huge, meaty hands.
Though she was terrified beyond measure, Lashon couldn’t help voicing the question that sprang immediately to mind. “Is this some kind of sick fucking joke?”
By way of an answer, the masked man yanked at the chainsaw’s starter cord and its blade instantly roared to full, buzzing life. The man raised the chainsaw over his head and squeezed something near its handle to push it to an even higher rev. Lashon’s immediate impression was that he looked very much like a man striking a deliberate pose.
Like, say, an actor in a movie.
A movie like
Chainsaw Maniac
, perhaps.
Lashon felt for a moment like a person locked inside an especially disturbing dream. This was all just too weird to be real. But that feeling was a trap and she quickly recognized it as such. Every other piece of sensory input told her this was all absolutely real and that she was in danger of suffering a nasty, painful death within moments.
The man revved the chainsaw as he began to advance on her. Lashon snapped out of her paralysis and began to stagger backward again, nearly tripping more than once. She knew she should turn and run right now, but the thought of turning her back on the chainsaw-wielding psycho was too terrifying. It was too easy to imagine that whirring blade sinking into the flesh between her shoulder blades once her back was to him.
Please, God,
she thought.
I don’t want to die. Not today. Not ever.
Please…
The man moved closer still and the end of the nastily buzzing blade was perhaps a foot from her face when she glimpsed a flash of movement at the edge of her peripheral vision. Something big was rushing straight at the masked man, who appeared not to sense the oncoming threat. Maybe it was the noise of the chainsaw that made him oblivious. Maybe he was just fucking stupid. Lashon didn’t care. All that mattered was that someone was apparently coming to her rescue. In the last moment before impact, she recognized that someone as the slightly heavyset man at the theater who’d come out of his chair to ask her if she was all right.
He collided with the masked psycho, jolting the chainsaw out of his hands as he drove the bigger man to the ground. The chainsaw thumped to the ground, where the blade dug for a moment into the soft earth before going still. Lashon stared at it for a shocked moment before shifting her attention to her rescuer. The guy was sitting astride the masked man and was hammering away at his hidden face with two big fists.