by Bryan Smith
“Says who?”
The other one remained stone-faced as he said, “You are to stay in this room until further notice by order of the Master.”
“The what now?”
The creepily smiling one said, “The Master.”
Kira nodded. “Right. That’s what I thought you said.”
But what kind of total whack job has his employees refer to him as ‘the Master’?
She kept that question to herself, figuring it could lead to nowhere good and that, anyway, there could be no sensible answer for it.
The smiling one glanced at her chest and then looked her in the eye again. “You should return to bed and await the honor of the Master’s presence. He is anxious to drink of you again.” His sinister smile broadened. “And to partake of your beauty in other ways, of course.”
Kira nodded again. “Uh huh. You talk exactly like you’re in some weird seventies eurovampire movie. You realize that, right?”
The Smiling One became the Frowning One. “I do not understand.”
“I know you don’t. Okay, so…I’m gonna, like, take your advice and go await the presence of this Master person.” She moved back a step and began to swing the door shut. “Later, guys.”
She stared at the closed door a long moment.
It was painfully obvious now that she was completely trapped.
Goddammit.
So she returned to the bed and waited for the vampire to come calling.
There was nothing else she could do.
One of the black-clad brutes kicked a door open and shoved Monroe roughly through it. His shoulder banged off the doorframe, sending a shock of pain down his left side as he staggered to the edge of a small landing at the top of a spiral stone staircase. The only light available spilled in from the mansion’s huge restaurant-style kitchen, through which the thugs had just dragged him en route to this place. The staircase twisted down into utter blackness. Monroe gulped. His first thought was it looked like a path straight down into the heart of hell itself.
But just as he was thinking that, torches mounted in sconces on the stone wall at descending intervals of approximately a dozen feet sparked to life. The flickering tongues of flame pushed back some of the darkness, enough that one could descend the staircase without taking a blind tumble, but the light was too hazy to glimpse the bottom, which at a guess had to be at least a hundred feet or more below the surface of the earth.
“Bloody hell. How is this even possible?”
By which he meant every aspect of his current situation. The abduction by vampires. The inexplicable lighting of the torches. What the fuck was that? Magic? And, perhaps the most pressing matter of all right at the moment, the mystery of whatever awaited him at the bottom of this medieval staircase.
He turned around to gape at the big thugs as they glared at him from the other side of the open door. “There any chance I could come back in there?”
“No.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
One of them curled one of his big hands into a fist, then gripped and squeezed it with his other hand, cracking the knuckles. A gesture meant to intimidate. It was effective, too. One side of the knuckle-cracker’s face twitched in a sneer. “Go down the stairs. Do not stop until you reach the bottom. Do not attempt to come back up.”
“What happens if I disobey?”
“You die.”
“Right. Well, I don’t want that, so…okay then.”
He moved away from the sneering thugs, took a deep breath, and took his first step down into the darkness. A moment later he heard the door slam shut behind him, followed by the sound of a deadbolt clicking into place. It was hard not to hear a bone-chilling finality in that sound. He now fully expected never to see the outside world again. As he descended the next dozen or so big stone steps, he began to perceive distant, barely audible sounds. He couldn’t identify them immediately, but another dozen winding steps down brought the sounds into slightly clearer focus and he felt another chill. This one went deeper, sinking its icy tentacles right into the very center of his trembling soul.
Moaning.
Screaming.
These were the things he was hearing.
And they were getting louder with every downward step. Monroe had a fleeting thought that maybe he should just pitch himself off the staircase. A fall to his death right now might well be a far better thing than meeting whatever was waiting for him down there. It would be easy enough to do. The staircase had no banister or railing. He could just stop right here and step over the edge. It would all be over quickly. He considered it only briefly, though. He really didn’t want to die. The only real option was to continue down to the bottom and hope for the best once he got there.
So he kept going.
And the sounds of torment kept getting louder.
First Intermission
Greg Nelson regained consciousness an indeterminate time after the flashes of white light. Unlike everyone else in attendance that night, however, he did not wake up somewhere outside the cineplex, although he did not initially realize this because the appearance of the building’s interior had changed dramatically during his time of unawareness.
He woke up facedown in one of the sloping aisles between sections of seats. Except that the worn and stained red carpet he remembered had been replaced by a series of rectangular white panels. The panels were translucent and he could make out vague shapes of some form of machinery beneath, the purpose of which he could not begin to divine. Things were moving down there in a kind of clockwork synchronicity.
There was light visible through the panels, too. And it was moving, a pulse of diffused brilliance that rotated slowly from the top of the aisle down to the bottom and back again. Over and over. For many hazy minutes Greg remained where he was, tracking the path of the light and the dimly perceived rotating gears, almost feeling hypnotized by the strange sights. But then, as his mind continued to clear, it occurred to him how very odd this all was. And as the last of the mental fog dissipated, he began to freak out a little.
He braced his hands on the panel beneath him and propelled himself upward, staggering backward a few clumsy steps as his feet fought to find purchase on the slippery panels. He eventually got himself properly righted and turned in a slow circle, gaping as he took it all in, marveling in terrified wonder at a transformed auditorium that looked like a sleek and ultrafuturistic chamber in the kind of starship that only existed in science fiction movies. The sections of seats were arranged precisely as they had been prior to the consciousness-obliterating flashes. There were double doors inside recessed alcoves at the top of each aisle. A large screen occupied the exact space one would expect. But any resemblance to any movie theater he had ever patronized ended right there.
Every seat looked as if it had been formed from the same seamless mold. There were no interlocking parts. No cushions that went up and down. He glanced down and noted that the seamlessness included where the legs of the seats met the floor. You couldn’t unbolt the things and remove them because they appeared to melt right into the floor. Also, they were all the same flawless shade of bone white. As was practically everything else in the theater, with the exception of the translucent floor panels and the screen. A kaleidoscope of slowly swirling color patterns danced lazily across the center of the screen. Lines of color extended outward, growing steadily thinner as they reached toward the edge of the screen before collapsing in upon themselves. An instant later, the pattern began to repeat. Like some kind of old school computer screensaver.
Odd.
Very, very odd.
The first thing he inferred from all this strange sensory input was that the theater he remembered hadn’t existed at all. Instead, it had been a highly realistic illusion of a decaying cineplex, an extraordinarily tactile skin image projected over this white skeleton beneath.
The second thing he gleaned from all this information was that it would likely be in his best interest to get the hell out
of this place as soon as possible.
Another thing hit him before he could act on that undoubtedly very intelligent impulse.
He was the only person left in the theater. Everyone else had vanished.
Where had they gone? And why had only he been left behind?
“Why me?”
He hadn’t intended to speak out loud. It had just happened, the words popping out before the thought had even registered. He regretted the utterance immediately. The sound resonated disturbingly in the empty space, echoing and bouncing back at him, making him cringe as if he had screamed the words instead of uttering them in his normal speaking voice.
Run, he thought. No more thinking. Just run.
NOW.
And so he did, spinning away from the screen to race to the top of the aisle and the double doors there. He seized one of the door handles, intending fully to yank it open and just keep running. But yet another disturbing thought flashed through his mind before he could do that.
The theater workers.
He had forgotten about them, but now he was remembering. Oh yes. All of them so strangely identical. So weird-looking. There had been something off about them. The one part of the illusion that hadn’t been perfect, perhaps? He thought so. More than that. He knew it. He didn’t know who or what those guys were, but they were not human.
And they might still be lurking out there in the lobby of this strange pseudotheater.
Shit.
He pressed his face up close to the door’s vertical window and peered out at the lobby. At first he thought there was nothing out there, just a formless white void, but then he began to make out shapes.
A short hallway led to the space that had functioned as the theater’s lobby. However, like this auditorium, it had been stripped of its illusory skin. From his vantage point, he could see a corner of what had been the concessions stand. A translucent panel hung on the wall behind it. Once it had displayed the prices of refreshments, but now it was a blank slate. His eyes flicked to the hallway floor and he saw another series of translucent panels, where another pulse of diffused light repeatedly made the circuit from one end of the hallway to the other and back again.
That impression of being aboard some unfathomably advanced starship returned, this time seeming a likely explanation for what he was seeing, rather than some fanciful notion based on movies. Which would mean the theater workers were imperfectly disguised members of an alien race. Some kind of weird research team that had come to earth to perform behavioral experiments on unsuspecting humans.
He thought he was really on to something there, but he couldn’t see what use the insight was to him. He wasn’t a hero in a movie. It wasn’t up to him to save the day or anything like that. He was just a regular guy with an unfortunate fixation on a girl who had hurt him, a stupid thing that had caused him to become caught up in a situation he couldn’t possibly solve. He couldn’t help any of the people who had disappeared from this place. Not even Lashon.
No one was moving around out there. It was time to stop cowering behind this fucking door and make a run for it.
Before he wound up trapped here forever.
Or killed.
He sucked in a big breath, slowly released it.
And then he pulled the door open.
Chapter Ten
They were coming closer.
The zombies.
Drawn from the shadows by the smell of fresh meat, appearing singly and in groups of two or three or more. A few looked fresh, as if they had just turned. But most more closely resembled the one Jason had put down. Their clothes were dirty and ragged. Their flesh bore evidence of old wounds, a few of which were especially hideous. Ripped-open stomach cavities and ruined faces.
One lumbering figure approaching from Brix’s left wore the uniform of a policeman. He was missing an arm. A fragment of bone protruded from the stump. But Brix’s gaze went to the empty holster attached to the belt around his narrow waist. She assumed the man had lost his sidearm during his own struggle for life. Which was too bad for him, but it reminded her of something important.
Like really, really fucking important.
The Glock in the glove compartment of the F-150.
Panic jolted her as a horrible thought flashed through her mind. This was a different version of reality from the one she had inhabited until a few moments ago. Did the big truck her father had passed down to her even exist in this world?
Shit.
She got a quick fix on her relative location in the parking lot and turned in the direction that should point her toward the truck—assuming it was even there.
There it is!
Her truck was parked right where she had left it, over by Jason’s shitty old Chevy Malibu, a couple dozen yards from where she stood now. She took off running, propelled forward by instinct, paying no mind to the startled voices calling after her.
They were surrounded by zombies. Enemies. Creatures intent on killing and devouring them. They needed some form of protection. More than that, a means of fighting back. She would feel better—more in control—with the reassuring weight of the Glock in her hands.
None of this was anything she consciously thought. They were things she understood on a gut level. The enemy had the greater numbers. The enemy would be relentless and unafraid. Her Glock 17’s magazine contained 17 bullets. Not nearly enough to permanently beat back an enemy as vast as the one they likely faced, but it was better than nothing. It was a start. A fucking fighting chance.
But something was wrong. She saw that too clearly as she drew closer to the hulking outline of the old F-150. She stopped short, her heart sinking as she saw that its windows had been blown out. But that was hardly the extent of the damage. Black scorch marks marred the truck’s exterior. The tires had melted.
But the moment of despair was short-lived. There was no time to wallow in it. She shoved away the reflexive self-pity. A deep-seated anger took root in its place. Someone had violated her property, an act constituting an assault against her personally. Something like that could not go unpunished. She couldn’t hit back against the specific individuals who had trashed her truck, but she had another target in mind—the mysterious creatures who had caused this reality split or whatever the hell it actually was. They were the ultimate responsible party here, and they would pay.
Somehow.
She heard feet pounding across the asphalt behind her. More panicked shouts. Brix ignored this and got moving once again. Seconds later she reached the truck.
The door on the passenger side was cool to the touch. She seized the handle and gave it a yank. Locked. Of course. She never left it otherwise. Her purse was back in the theater in that other reality, so she didn’t have her keys. But given the condition of the truck, that wasn’t really a problem.
She slithered in through the open window, a pile of safety glass on the floorboard crunching beneath her booted feet as she situated herself in front of the glove compartment.
Just one problem.
The fire had melted the truck’s entire dash, including the glove compartment’s door. The melted plastic had congealed around its edges. She gripped the mangled handle and pulled on it with all her might, but it wouldn’t budge.
She thumped a fist against the ruined dash.
“Shit!”
“What the fuck are you doing in there?”
Jason Tatum, his voice right next to her.
Brix glanced out the window and saw him standing next to the truck. His eyes were wide and his chest was going up and down, a result of chasing her across the lot. He looked scared. She couldn’t blame him. He was still holding the tire iron. It was the old kind, a long, rust-flecked piece of metal with a socket for turning lug nuts and a pronged end for popping off hubcaps.
Brix leaned through the window and snatched it from his hands.
His face contorted in a mix of surprise and fury. “Hey! Give that back!”
“Sorry. I need it.”
Sh
e poked at the edges of the glove compartment’s door with the pronged end of the tire iron, feeling for an open space where she could insert the metal. She finally found an opening in the melted plastic, albeit a very small one, and then gritted her teeth as she tightened her grip on the tire iron. Calling upon every ounce of strength she possessed, she drove the thing deeper into that tiny hole. The hole widened and she began cranking the tool up and down.
There was a cracking sound as some of the melted plastic began to give way. Still, the marginally wider opening wasn’t nearly big enough. She had to keep working at it. So she tightened her grip again and redoubled the effort, nearly screaming through her gritted teeth at the strain it was causing in her arms and shoulders.
Jason had fallen silent. She could feel him watching her, probably wondering what on earth could possibly be worth this kind of effort, especially in the midst of this much danger.
“My gun.”
“Say again?”
At least he sounded somewhat calmer now.
“My gun. My Glock. It’s in the goddamn glove box.”
“Oh.”
“We need it.”
A pause, followed by a sigh. “Right. Okay. I get that. Really. But if you can’t get to it in the next few seconds…”
He let the rest of it hang there.
Brix didn’t need to hear the words. She knew well enough what the stakes were. Either she would get this damn thing open and get to the gun right now, or it was time to accept defeat and get out of here and get running again.
She shifted her position on the barren seat bench, folded one leg beneath her for greater leverage, and screamed as she again cranked the tire iron up and down. The cracking sound was louder this time and an instant later the pronged end of the tool slipped all the way into the compartment.
Brix shifted her body around again, pressing the sole of a boot against the tire iron while she gripped the socket end with both hands. She shoved downward ferociously and was rewarded with the loudest crackling of yielding plastic yet. The compartment door dropped open and there was the Glock. She nearly cried at the sight of that lovely shiny-nickel plating.
