by Mia Archer
I opened my mouth with the retort on my tongue already. I was ready to lay into him. Ready to tell him exactly what I thought about his plans for pulling me into his life.
So it took me a moment to realize that what I thought he’d said and what he’d actually said were two very different things. I closed my mouth. Opened it again.
“Really?” I asked. “You’re not going to try and convince me to stay?”
“Why?” he asked. “Do you want me to try and convince you?”
“No,” I said. “I mean I don’t know. It’s just that…”
“I kept my distance,” he said. “I respected that you wanted to lead your own life, and I wasn’t going to do anything to stop that from happening.”
“Right,” I said.
And when I thought about it I realized he was telling the truth. He really had kept his distance. Once I’d gone off to live with my grandma he hadn’t been there at all, except for an occasional note on a birthday or showing up to my graduation.
“Damn,” I said.
“Is something wrong with that plan?” he asked.
“It’s just that I came here fully prepared to be pissed off at you, for you to try and get me back into the life, and…”
“You don’t know what to do now that I’m telling you to go do your own thing?” he said with a grin.
“That’s not…”
I closed my mouth again. Sighed.
“That’s totally what I was about to say,” I said. “I hate that you know what I’m about to say before I say it.”
“It’s comes from raising you,” he said. “It gives you a lot of insight into a person’s personality when you had to teach them how to go to the bathroom and wipe their ass.”
“Thanks for that image,” I said.
“Anyway,” he said. “It seems like you’ve had quite a night. If you want to get back to the normal life you had here then I won’t stop you. It’d be nice if you went into the family business, what father doesn’t dream of that, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to force you into anything you don’t want to do.”
“Right,” I said, turning for the exit. “In that case I’ll be moving along and…”
“Of course…”
I sighed and turned to face him.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said.
“Obviously it’s something,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing that annoying thing.”
“What annoying thing?” he asked.
“The annoying thing where you say something that’s designed to get me to turn around and rethink leaving all this behind.”
“I’d never dream of…”
“Can it,” I said. “I know you’re full of shit, so out with it already.”
“I was thinking you just had most of your friends on your cheerleading squad coming over to my side,” he said. “It’d be a damn shame if you left all your friends behind to be thrown to the wolves.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said.
“I wouldn’t do something like that, no,” he said. “But they’re going to be in a strange new world with no idea what the hell they’re doing. It’d be nice if they had a friendly face to show them the ropes, don’t you think?”
My eyes narrowed.
“You fight dirty, you know that, right?”
“The beautiful thing is I’m not fighting at all,” he said. “I’m just giving you a push in the right direction. You know you were born for this, even if you want to pretend you weren’t.”
“But I have a good thing going here,” I said.
And I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t just talking about the whole cheerleading thing or my grades or life on campus. No, I was also talking about Cara.
“That girl you were with?” he asked. “There’s no rule against having a girlfriend while you’re in the service, you know. I never put up with that ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ bullshit even when it was still a thing.”
“Yeah, because being in a relationship ended so well for you,” I said.
“I get the feeling that girl knows how to handle herself in a fight,” he said, grinning. “At least if the way she was carrying those silver slingers is anything to go on!”
“She does,” I said, a faint smile coming to my face as I thought about everything she’d done. “I wouldn’t have made it through this without her, to be honest.”
“Really?” Dad asked, sounding surprised.
“My first inclination through this whole thing has been to go in with guns blazing,” I said. “It turns out she’s been watching horror movies her whole life, and the entire time she’s been planning for what she’d do if she ever got caught in one.”
“That’s a good idea,” my dad said, a twinkle in his eyes as he said it. “It seems to me a girl like that is a girl you might want to keep around, if you catch my drift.”
“Yeah, you might be right about that,” I said, thinking about our conversation outside the arena and getting some warm fuzzies.
“And she could always join the family business,” he said. “Something tells me a girl like that isn’t going to be all that interested in the usual college stuff after this.”
“Maybe,” I said, not so sure about that, but it was something to talk about.
Later. After our first date. Talking about going into the monster hunting business together definitely seemed like a second date conversation at least, even considering the way we’d gotten together.
41
Kirsten
I took in a deep breath and inhaled the smell of popcorn as I looked at a crowd that was very different from the last time we’d been in here.
Most of them seemed a touch nervous about being here. As well they should.
This was a big campus, after all, but that didn’t mean there was a huge population of horror buffs around here. No, just the right amount to sustain a horror movie night.
Which meant most of the people here tonight had also been here the night the werewolf attacked. Not to mention they’d all definitely been around when the whole campus was attacked.
There’d been a couple of think pieces in the campus paper about how it was wildly inappropriate to be having a horror movie night so soon after everything that’d happened, but those articles had quickly been scrubbed from the Internet.
There were people out there who didn’t want the world thinking too much about werewolves in connection with this campus, even if it was people writing think pieces about what everybody knew had happened around here and was pretending hadn’t.
“You’re her,” someone whispered, coming up next to us.
I turned and blinked. It was none other than the redneck asshole who’d had that gun out the first night here. The one who’d fired into the crowd and caught a couple of people by surprise.
“Who’s this asshole?” Cara asked.
A couple of other people had stopped to glare at him. Apparently he hadn’t gotten his just desserts at the hands of that werewolf, and there’d been so many people killed by the werewolf that the cops didn’t bother to count people with bullets in them when it came to handing out murder charges.
“This is the asshole who opened fire into a crowd trying to stop a werewolf with regular bullets,” I said.
“Fuck you,” the guy said. “You broke my fucking nose!”
“I’m going to do a hell of a lot worse than that if you don’t get the fuck away now,” I said.
I guess it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that this asshole was here tonight, but it annoyed me. All the people who lost their lives the last time around, and this prick managed to survive not only the horror movie night and campus being overrun by werewolves?
If ever there was proof there wasn’t any justice in this world, then this guy’s continued existence was it.
A blur moved past me. I put my hands up preparing for an attack from a werewolf.
The guy screamed and put a hand to his face as bloo
d fountained out from his nose.
I turned on whatever had caused that blood, and I was surprised to see Cara standing there breathing heavily as she stood over the guy while he toppled to the ground, her hand balled into a fist.
“That’s what you get for talking to my girlfriend like that, you asshole!” she shouted.
I looked up and around. People were staring, but there were more than a few who started to clap.
It wasn’t like a movie where everyone started from a slow clap and then suddenly everybody in the room was applauding, but there was a smattering of applause.
“That asshole shot me last time we were here!” someone shouted.
“Yeah! And my girlfriend didn’t get away from the werewolf because she was afraid of him shooting!” someone else said.
Then something I really hadn’t anticipated happened. The crowd moved in on him, malevolent anger clear in their eyes, and suddenly everybody was kicking and hitting as they piled on.
Okay then. I guess there were people here tonight who’d survived the initial horror night. A couple of them looked up at me and gave me a thumbs up right before they went back to punching the guy with all the force they could muster.
Meanwhile he was balled up into a fetal position crying, but it was the least he deserved.
I’d seen enough death and destruction lately that I couldn’t feel too bad about this guy getting the shit kicked out of him. I turned to Cara who was still breathing heavily and looking oh so delicious.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“I know exactly what came over you,” I said, pulling her in closer and hitting her with a kiss. “And I like it!”
“You think that’s the kind of thing that’ll help me when we go off to join your dad in the little club he’s running?” she asked.
I frowned. Shook my head.
“Let’s not talk about that right now,” I said. “This is date night. I don’t want to think about that stuff.”
We moved away from the crowd hitting and kicking the dude. That crowd meant there wasn’t much of a line for popcorn. Cara looked like she was maybe feeling a little queasy, no doubt thinking about what’d happened the last time around, but I was all for some popcorn and candy.
“Just eat the stuff. You’ll be over your sour stomach in no time,” I said.
“Who said I had a sour stomach?” Cara asked, going pale as she no doubt remembered more of the fun from the last time we were in here.
“You can’t bullshit me,” I said with a grin.
We got to the front where I saw none other than the girl from the last time around.
Tonight they were doing a retrospective on Robert Englund’s masterpiece, and she was in a sweater with alternating bars that weren’t quite the right color but were close enough for someone working a theme night at a movie theater.
“You,” she said, her eyes wide.
“Me,” I said.
I was starting to get tired of that recognition.
“You’re a hero!” Cara said, wrapping her arm around me and leaning in close. “That’s so hot that everyone is so awestruck by you, you know that, right?”
Okay then. So maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to have everybody recognizing me. I looked at Cara and grinned, and she leaned in and kissed me.
“You eat for free tonight,” the girl said. “No overpriced popcorn for you.”
I blinked. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” she said. “Your money is no good here. Orders from the manager herself!”
“Well… Thanks?” I said.
It wasn’t long before we had all our stuff, absolutely free of charge thank you very much, and we were making our way into the theater proper.
The place was crowded, but that was to be expected. This theater really knew how to pack people in on their theme nights, and more power to them for figuring out a way to continue operating in a world that’d been dominated more and more by massive multiplexes.
“Packed house tonight,” Cara said.
“You know it,” I said.
“It’s enough to make me wish we’d stayed home and so we could watch some cheesy third rate movie on Netflix or something,” she said.
“You know the horror stuff they have on Netflix isn’t that great,” I said.
“What about that movie about the girl stranded on an island being attacked by the fish creature thing?” she asked. “That scene where she fires off flare and the thing suddenly appears silhouetted in the distance? Talk about chills.”
I laughed and shook my head. She sure seemed to have a love for the genre these days, for all that she complained about being forced to watch horror movies by her brothers back in the day.
“Let’s find a seat,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” she said. “If we’d stayed at your place we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone interrupting us making out.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Not everything has to be about making out.”
“I can’t believe you’d say something like that,” she said. “Especially considering how much you enjoy sucking face.”
“Come on,” I said, moving towards some open seats close to the front. Which wasn’t ideal, but whatever.
“Hey! Werewolf killer!” someone shouted from the middle.
I turned to see a guy I didn’t recognize waving at me with a goofy grin that said he wasn’t a creepy stalker.
“We saved the best seats in the house for you!” he said.
I looked at Cara and then back to the dude. Sure enough, there was a group of people right there in the middle of the theater looking at me expectantly.
“I guess there are perks to going on a date with a famous monster killer,” Cara muttered.
“Stuff it,” I muttered.
“Maybe later if you play your cards right,” she said with a wink.
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was filled with delightful innuendo.
So we moved to seats that were just right. This was an old school theater which meant there was no stadium seating at the back end of the place, but that didn’t mean there weren’t good seats. Right in the middle had always been my favorite.
And as we got to our seats people started clapping again. This time it wasn’t a small smattering of applause. No, this time the entire theater was erupting in applause and cheers.
“What the hell?” I asked, staring.
“If I had to guess, I’d say you’re being thanked by a theater full of people who would’ve been killed by a werewolf if you hadn’t come along to save their asses,” Cara said.
“Damn,” I said.
People moved in around us grinning and slapping my back. Some of them moving past thanked me. Others gave me nods before moving on, doing that weird shuffle everyone has to do moving around in a theater. One girl held my hands and did nothing but cry.
Basically it was a situation I was totally unprepared for.
“This is crazy,” I said.
“It might be crazy, but it’s the least the great werewolf killer deserves,” Cara said.
“I suppose,” I said, still not sure what to make of all of it.
It felt good having an entire theater applauding me and thanking me for saving their asses. I’d been operating under the assumption that nobody gave a shit other than Cara and my dad. It was nice to know there was a face to all the people I’d saved, and they were grateful.
It was a good feeling.
Cara pulled me in for a hug. Then she leaned in and hit me with one hell of a kiss, and that had the crowd going even more wild than before. She pulled away and grinned.
“You’re a hero,” she said. “Don’t knock it. It’s a good look for you. And it’s definitely going to get you laid later tonight!”
I let her hold me close. I enjoyed the pleasurable little aftershocks that came from that kiss. And as I looked around the room I decided this hero thing was something I could get
used to.
Now there was something my dad never told me about. I wondered if part of the reason he was constantly doing the monster hunting thing was because he was chasing this high. If that was the case then it looked like I’d made the right decision by agreeing to go into the family business.
I could worry about all the complications that came from that later. Right now I was here with Cara, and I wanted to have a fun date with my best girl.
So I sat, enjoyed some of my free popcorn and candy I was going to have to spend a couple of hours in the gym working off, and settled in for a good time watching Robert Englund killing some teenagers.
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