by Ryan Harding
Reincarnage
Ryan Harding and Jason Taverner
DEADITE PRESS
P.O. BOX 10065
PORTLAND, OR 97296
www.DEADITEPRESS.com
AN ERASERHEAD PRESS COMPANY
www.ERASERHEADPRESS.com
ISBN: 978-1-62105-215-9
Reincarage copyright © 2015 by Ryan Harding and Jason Taverner
Cover art copyright © 2015 by Jim Agpalza
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Printed in the USA.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors wish to express their gratitude to their test readers for all the invaluable feedback – James Carroll, Kelly Robinson, and Pierce Zirnheld. Thank you also to Jeff Burk, Carlton Mellick III, and Rose O’Keefe of Deadite/Eraserhead Press; Gabino Iglesias; Ann Laymon; Edward Lee; and Bryan Smith.
Special recognition goes to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (RIP), whose influence was vital to this novel, in addition to the slasher films of the ‘70s and ‘80s.
One
Adam awoke from a pretty awesome dream. He was in line at the post office and the girl behind the counter was topless. How are they losing so much money every year? he wondered. She’d been blonde, but somehow faceless, as if he used up all his dream power on her absurdly endowed chest. What was that, an F cup? He had a package for her, all right, and a potentially hazardous one at that.
“Can I help the next in line?” she asked.
He shuffled forward, noting the emergence of a smile on her otherwise blank face.
“Don’t miss the shuttle, Adam,” she said. “You know what day it is, don’t you?”
He didn’t, but knew he wasn’t going to miss the shuttle since there was about to be a blast-off in his pants. He awoke as the urge threatened to reach the point of no return, and found himself face-down on the carpet. A shame he never actually touched her, but it was for the best. Splooging yourself in a hotel room with your parents wasn’t very baller.
What the hell was he doing on the floor, though?
The carpet was thick and green, and might have been new when atomic bomb drills were in vogue. His mom would have one word for it—tacky—but Pamela Kirshoff hadn’t seen it yet, and until now neither had he. This wasn’t their room at the Coral Beach Inn.
Adam lifted his head from the carpet, wincing at the sharp pain in his skull. He wiped a generous helping of drool from the corner of his mouth as he surveyed the room.
No, definitely not the right room. There was only one bed, upon which his parents lay fully clothed. Adam remembered dressing for bed last night, but not in an orange shirt and red shorts, which he wouldn’t have worn together in the first place. They wouldn’t pass his mother’s inspection if he tried.
“Mom?” he said. His voice sounded weak.
A painting hung above the bed, a mountain range with a blanket of pine trees. The décor did not suggest the ocean. The Coral Beach Inn had a sailboat painting and seashell knick knacks. This room looked like the kind of place a traveling salesman would eat a gun.
Adam had been stoked for this family outing, and two days in he wasn’t disappointed in the least. He’d never seen so many girls in bikinis. It had been a solid forty-eight hours of voyeuristic splendor. He wore the darkest sunglasses he could find and watched the skin show with a sense of awe and desperate longing. In his mind he approached the hottest ones, told them a bunch of absurd lies about himself (“I’m the most popular guy at school and I’m already being recruited by Duke”), then slipped away with them under the pier and brought them all to orgasm two or three times in about as many minutes. In reality, he’d yet to strike up a conversation with a single girl and had beat off with suntan lotion about three times. Zero phone numbers or email addresses and zero chance of getting skin cancer on his junk.
He cleared his throat. “Mom? Dad?”
Not panicked yet. His parents were here, so nothing could be too amiss, could it? If not awake, they at least didn’t appear hurt. The room thing was weird, but hardly perilous unless a tacky carpet was somehow fatal.
Adam used the edge of the bed to pull himself up. He waited for vertigo to pass. A tableside lamp offered weak light. There’d be a Bible in the drawer. He thought his mom had to be one of the only people in the world who would take it out and actually read it. Kind of surprising she didn’t bring her own from home, a heavily self-annotated book which usually factored into his lessons at some point. It was always good to get away from the house and home schooling in general.
Why was it so dark if he slept through the night? Adam stumbled over to the window, aware of an absence of crashing waves in the distance. They had been a constant in Malcasa Point, like rolling static, but here it was dead silent. He flipped the curtain aside. He may as well have stared into a black hole. He framed his hands over his eyes to block out the weak glare and peered outside.
Nothing.
His sluggishness vanished altogether. Adam hurried back to the bed. “Mom! Dad! Wake up!” He shook them both.
His dad stirred, opened his eyes in slits. “What? What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong.” He patted the pocket of his shorts for his cell phone—something his parents provided him more for the convenience of tracking him than the benefit of his meager social life—and didn’t find it. It was nowhere in the room.
No bags, he realized. There was a tall armoire and a dresser with an ancient-looking TV. He’d only seen its equal in the junk room at his friend Kevin’s house. They covertly hooked it up to watch some prehistoric porno videos (relics from Kevin’s father) on something called a “Betamax.”
Adam pulled open both doors. A few wire hangers rattled around, carrying nothing.
His mother stirred. “Ed? What’s going on?” She already sounded panicked, but that was normal for her. “Where are we?”
Adam’s stomach did an elevator dive. They don’t know how we got here either.
His dad swung his legs to the floor and massaged his forehead. “Everyone calm down.” He sounded annoyed, like they awoke him early on a day off.
Adam shared a frightened look with his mother. Her brow furrowed after a moment. “Why are you wearing those shorts with that shirt?”
He pulled the shirt down a little, as if to cover the shorts. “I didn’t put these on.”
Did she think he’d end up on the news, interviewed in clashing colors for the world to condemn?
His father looked around. “Where the hell are we?”
“This isn’t the Coral Beach Inn.”
“Thanks for the news flash, Pamela.” His dad smoothed his rumpled shirt and frowned. The buttons were out of alignment. He undid a few and put them through their proper slots. It was a white shirt over yellow pants Adam wouldn’t have worn in a million years. Like something from the special Douche line of golf wear. It wasn’t the shirt his dad usually wore with them, a much darker shade of Douche.
Adam’s mom wore a white shirt with orange capris, something she at least might have chosen on her own.
Why do we all look like we’re shooting a Tide commercial?
“Adam, check if we’re locked in.” He said it without concern, as though asking for a socket wrench.
Adam swallowed. He considered checking earlier, but was too scared to find out they were indeed trapped. He’d hoped a simple explanation would present itself first.
He looked back to see his dad lift the receiver from a blocky-looking telephone on the nightstand. T
he handset had a red bulb for message alerts. He listened, tapped the prongs a few times, then slammed it down as if to punish it for defying him.
“Hell.” He still didn’t sound worried, only greatly inconvenienced.
Adam tried to imagine what they could say if it worked. We’re at a hotel we don’t remember checking into…please send a SWAT team!
He hurried the last steps to the door and checked the peephole before his father asked why he was gawking. He expected the blackness of the window but there was light and an empty hallway. He turned the knob. It clicked as the lock disengaged, and he pulled the door all the way open.
“It’s unlocked,” he said, suddenly lightheaded again. He slipped the chain through the crack so it wouldn’t shut completely. Just in case.
“Thank God,” his mom said. She pushed herself up from the bed as Adam turned back to them. “Maybe we can find someone who knows what’s going on here.”
His dad gave the phone the evil eye. “We’ll find someone, all right. Someone needs their ass sued six ways from Sunday over this.”
His mom winced. She didn’t like that kind of language.
“I don’t think we’re at the beach anymore,” Adam said. “You can’t hear the ocean. You can’t even see anything out the window.”
His dad scowled and crossed over to the window, ear angled toward the glass as if to listen for a coin he’d tossed into the black hole. He pushed at the sill. It didn’t budge. Adam thought of the blackness beyond and had the crazy thought they were in outer space and would be sucked right into the vacuum if his dad opened it.
That’s stupid. What’d they do, strap a rocket to the hotel and blast us off?
His dream came back to him at that moment, unbidden, the buxom woman with no face. Don’t miss the shuttle, Adam. You know what day it is, don’t you?
Actually, he didn’t know.
His mom walked over to where he stood and flipped on the light of the bathroom to his left. She peered in and checked a couple of drawers. All empty. What they wore was apparently all they kept of their belongings. He mourned the loss of his iPod. He’d had the complete discography of Busta Kapp, which Kevin downloaded from a torrent for him, in addition to four hundred other songs.
His dad thumped the window sill with the flat of his hand, as if it had conspired with the telephone. He turned away from it with a look of disgust.
“Did you see anything?” Adam asked.
“I think it was painted over.”
He felt irrational relief over that—not orbiting the planet after all—but it was quickly tempered by unease over why someone would have blackened the window in the first place.
“Hey!”
Adam flinched. Someone was out in the hallway.
Two
Adam’s dad took the lead outside. The voice belonged to a broad-shouldered man in loud green chinos with a look of bewilderment to mirror their own.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “I’m Nathan, and I have no idea how the hell I got here. I’m guessing it’s the same for you three.”
He extended a hand and shook with Adam’s dad. It struck Adam as funny that such social etiquette continued even in circumstances like these.
“Ed Kirshoff. This is my wife Pamela and son Adam.”
Nathan nodded at them. “This is the craziest thing I ever heard of. Where are we?”
“No idea. Were you at the beach?”
Nathan cocked an eyebrow. “No, I’m afraid I don’t get out to the beaches of St. Louis very often.”
“St. Louis?”
“Yeah, I was on business.”
Adam’s mom couldn’t take her eyes off Nathan’s pants, as if to say, You were trying to do business in those? “We were on vacation in Malcasa Point,” she said.
Another door clicked open a few rooms past Nathan and the head of a tall black man craned around the edge, as if to assess their threat potential. He muttered something back toward the room and held the door as a woman joined him. She had a much lighter shade of skin, but also looked to be African American. The man wore long green athletic pants of a flashy material and a lime T, a colorful complement to her lavender shirt and cream slacks.
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” Nathan said. “You woke up in a hotel room with no idea how you got there—”
“Stop.”
Nathan nodded. “Same here.”
“I’m Marcus.” The fabric of his pants hissed as he joined the group. “This is Suzanne.”
Suzanne offered a little wave.
They were probably closer to Adam’s age than his parents’, but not by much.
“We also figured out we’re from different places,” Adam added.
Nathan looked annoyed, as if he should be the one to dispense all the known facts, but said nothing.
“Y’all ain’t from Memphis?”
“We were vacationing in California,” his dad said.
“St. Louis,” Nathan said. “What’s the last thing you remember? Any of you.”
“We were in our room watching TV,” his mom said. “Next thing we knew, we were here.”
“Yeah, pretty much the same thing for me.”
“We weren’t at a hotel,” Suzanne said. “We were driving to my parents’. We stopped to pick up a cake for my dad’s birthday. I don’t think we got there.”
“Nah,” Marcus said. “Cuz I don’t remember any of that passive-aggressive bullshit we usually hear from your moms.”
Adam’s mom tensed, as if profanity was new to him and would instantly corrupt him. He heard worse just last night while his parents watched some dumb movie made from a Nicholas Sparks book where the dude probably died at the end. Adam poked in an ear bud from his iPod and jammed Busta Kapp’s “Bitchez Don’t Be Knowin’.” Maybe the movie put them all to sleep.
“I’m not even sure what day it is,” Nathan said. “When’s the last one you remember?”
“Tuesday,” Adam said immediately. He’d seen some hot blonde twins rollerblading and thought about saying, “Hey, is this Two for Tuesday?” But it was more like Mute for Tuesday because he never opened his mouth.
“Yeah, had tickets to the Grizzlies and Celtics and got to go to a birthday party instead.” Marcus rolled his eyes.
“I told you three weeks ago,” Suzanne said.
“I know. I just bet there wasn’t nobody at the game who vanished. Except maybe Rajon Rondo.”
Adam’s mom cringed at this breach of contract with proper grammar. If there was one thing she wanted to instill in his studies besides a greater role of religion, it was a respect for the proper use of language. He wasn’t sure what would offend her most about “Bitchez Don’t Be Knowin’” between the profanity and grammar.
Nathan ignored the exchange. “Okay, so it’s probably Wednesday. No cell phones, right?”
His dad shook his head. “No. All gone, and the room phone is dead.”
“Ours too,” Marcus said.
“Did you see anything out your window?” Adam’s father asked.
Marcus and Suzanne shook their heads.
“Nothing,” Nathan said. “It looked painted over.”
Eels squirmed in Adam’s guts. The blackened windows again. What was going on?
“We can break one if we have to, but no need to announce we’re up just yet if no one’s watching. Let’s look around. We’re not learning anything just standing here.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” his mom asked.
“Why not? We weren’t locked in and we’re not hurt, are we? What about you, Aaron? Didn’t wake up with a burning asshole, did you?”
“Wh—” The words died in Adam’s mouth. He barely noticed being called by the wrong name. His mom turned white as a sheet beside him. Marcus glared expectantly, though Adam wasn’t sure if the question irritated him or he just really wanted to know the answer. He finally mumbled, “No.”
“Good, then we’re doing this,” Nathan said. “Follow me.”
It earned him a funny look from Marcus, who shared it with Suzanne. They both shrugged.
Adam’s mother took his hand and they followed his dad and Nathan. It was a bit embarrassing, picturing Marcus and Suzanne sharing another look and shrug behind him, but he knew it made her feel a little better and it wasn’t all bad for him either, even if sixteen was a bit old to cling to his mommy. They spent a lot more time together than most mothers and sons because of the home schooling. Whatever occasional grievances he had about that situation, at least he was safe. Kevin told him last semester some kid got jumped in the bathroom and taken out on a stretcher with blood running from his ear.
He narc’d on Jordy O’Bannon for having brass knuckles. Found out real fast that Jordy didn’t need ‘em to put someone on Front Street, though. No bullshit.
Dad, of course, said the parents should sue the school’s ass. He probably wished Adam went there so he’d be at risk of the sort of random violence that could put Ed Kirshoff on Easy Street with that lucrative lawsuit that was always just over the rainbow.
The doors were shut on both sides of the hallway. A few had DO NOT DISTURB placards, but knocks went unanswered and no one else emerged from any rooms. They found an elevator, though nothing happened when they pushed the up and down buttons. The corridor ended in a metal door with an EXIT sign and a sliver of a window with an encased grid of chicken wire. Nathan angled to see through the pane without putting his face up to it, momentarily obstructing an arrow painted on the wall to indicate the door, its triangular tip poking out behind him just below shoulder level. Satisfied of no threat, he at last pushed the bar. Adam expected it to be locked, but it opened on the stairwell.
They received an instant education in how woefully unprepared they were for anything as they froze stiff at the sound of approaching footsteps from above, too many to be one person. Two women paused on the landing one flight up. One was in her thirties, a blonde with ponytailed hair. She stood a head taller than her companion, a slightly older woman in a bright red pantsuit. The blonde relaxed somewhat at the sight of Adam. The other stared wildly at the group like they were supernatural manifestations. She clutched the blonde’s arm either for support or to launch her as a projectile at the awful ghost people.
