The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror

by Adam Cesare

  The seasons were changing, though, so it was probably October, late-September at the earliest.

  When they opened the van doors he could plead with them. Working fast would be crucial to ensure he wasn’t immediately executed when they got him to where they were going—he assumed—to dump his body. In the darkness he tried to think of examples of how much help he could still provide to their enterprise. He made the costume and told them how to handle the blood. What did he have left to offer?

  Back at the house, Keith had noticed that Teeks took two kinds of phone calls. The first was informal chats with employees (co-conspirators) like Rory and a woman he’d never seen named Kim. These were usually short, a time and place to meet, and then he took business calls that were a little harder to parse. On those calls the name MTY Productions kept coming up and there were discussions about numbers that Keith assumed were money. If it were one of the rare days where Keith was brought into the house to work, Teeks usually took the cordless phone out onto the porch where it was harder to hear. Keith took this to mean there was still a chance of him being let go alive. He hadn’t seen these men kill anyone, only kidnap and intimidate. But both men smelled like cigarettes and neither smoked inside, so Teeks might not have been keeping anything from Keith on purpose. Those calls could have just been smoke breaks.

  After months of listening to one side of Teeks’ phone conversations and the simplified talks that he’d have with Rory, Keith still wasn’t quite sure what the two were planning, what Blood Camp Con was. But he had a rough idea, one he used his own life and career to put into context.

  It was Keith Lumbra’s father who’d gotten him into film.

  Well, saying it like that didn’t sound right. Everyone liked movies, they didn’t need anyone to “get them into” them. Society at large did that work. But people who really enjoyed movies understood what Keith’s interest level was like.

  “He can miss a few days of elementary school. Boy’s smart and can catch up on what’s five times five tomorrow.” His dad would provide that and similar excuses for Keith to play hooky and go to the movies.

  Keith’s dad preferred more serious fare, what Keith would later regard as Oscar bait, but he was fine encouraging his young son’s interest in adventure films and sci-fi that bordered on insufferable kiddie stuff (he was a kid, after all). It was Keith’s eventual turn toward horror that baffled his dad. In high school, during the car ride driving back from seeing Rob Zombie’s debut House of 1000 Corpses (a movie he had since stopped defending at conventions), Keith’s father had interrupted his son’s praise of the film:

  “I just don’t know. Like, you’re a good kid and I know that you like the things you do for the right reasons—as a film—but you’ve got to understand that I watch some of this shit and I wonder: what about the people watching for the wrong reasons? The ones getting off on it.”

  At the time the words had wounded Keith, a far deeper wound than his dad simply disagreeing about movie he liked, but he didn’t understand why.

  For most of his life, through all the films he’d made, cons he’d attended, the fake blood he’d waded through, and the flamewars he’d started online, Keith had held firm that his dad was wrong about horror, that he just didn’t understand the genre or its fans.

  Now, after spending weeks in the presence of Rory and Teeks, hearing the vague outline of what they had planned for their convention, Keith was horrified that part of his reaction to the plans was glee. On some level, their plans were awesome.

  Rory and Teeks were the kind of horror fans Keith’s father had worried existed and it turned out that maybe Keith was one of them.

  On the cusp of connecting that piece of self-discovery to another, Keith was interrupted by a change in movement. Under him, the frame of the van rattled and during lulls in the stereo Keith could hear pebbles and dirt being flung up and bouncing off of the wheel wells.

  The van had pulled off-road.

  This cemented it: what had been a theory would now need to be put into practice.

  He had to convince Teeks and Rory of his usefulness or they were going to kill him.

  Well, actually, there was a fourth option that he hadn’t considered before now: Keith could just give up and die.

  Something about that appealed to him, especially since his broken nose had started to feel warm in recent days, the sensation almost a burn, an itch. Keith had heard once that if you made a triangle with your thumbs and pointer fingers and placed your nose in the center of that triangle you’d outline what dermatologists called your danger zone. You weren’t supposed to pop any pimples that grew inside the danger zone, because if they went septic then those blood vessels could get infected and that infection could easily jump to your brain.

  Maybe that was what was happening. Maybe his wounds had been torn open so many times that they’d gone putrid: sepsis of the danger zone would likely lead to insanity before resulting in death, no?

  Did he have a fever?

  The thought was interrupted by the van settling to a stop, the music cutting short.

  Keith didn’t want to die but he didn’t feel up to arguing about it, so what he did was begin to cry.

  The door opened and as the light spilled into the van Keith could see the crosshatching of the burlap in front of his eyes.

  “Get up, we’re here.” Rory said.

  “Please please please,” Keith heard himself say, the words punctuated by sobs and becoming a kind of song.

  “What’s your fucking problem? Get. Up.”

  There was a slam—Rory kicking the bumper, maybe?—and Keith crawled onto his knees. The vibrations from lying on the floor had turned his left side into jelly, his muscles tingled and felt weak. Or maybe that was the shock and despair.

  On his knees, trying to feel for the end of the van with his tied hands, Keith could sense Rory’s impatience building. He was going to get hit for this, he knew it, but there was just no way to make himself move any faster.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Teeks said, his voice and footprints rounding the side of the van. Keith looked out and could just see their silhouettes behind the mesh of the bag.

  Rory helped Keith with his indecision. The big man reached out and grabbed him by the shirt collar, pulling him out the door. The hard-packed dirt rose up to meet him.

  Hitting the earth replaced the numbness in his limbs with pain. If he survived the next five minutes, he would take a second to be thankful that he was able to feel anything.

  “Don’t kill me,” Keith said, finding his voice. “Help!” he began to shout, only once the word was out realizing how that could be misinterpreted as calling for help. “I can help!” he clarified his screams: “I can help you. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t.”

  There was the sound of laughter. It was Teeks’. Rory, for all of his childlike enthusiasm and lack of intelligence, was often the more serious of the two, at least around their captive. If the big man did laugh, he tried not to do it in front of Keith, like he was trying to prove what a tough guy he was, that he was the kind of kidnapper who wouldn’t think twice about killing Keith.

  There was a moment where no one spoke, a moment filled with the sound of Keith’s nose whistle and that sound alone.

  “Oh we know that you’ll help,” Teeks said.

  Someone tugged off the bag and Keith wasn’t able to get his eyes closed soon enough. The green-white of the sunlight blinded him and caused his headache to intensify.

  “We’re not going to kill you, Lumbra,” Teeks continued. “If we did that then who else is going to hook up the cameras?”

  Keith opened his eyes and watched as the out of focus world around him resolved itself into a campground: the cabins, the mess hall, the trees and the rope swings.

  Oh God.

  They were really doing it.

  Chapter Nine

  Teeks had been transparent with Marcus Lang and the actor had appreciated the candor.

  Marcus wasn’t the star o
f Blood Camp Con. He was a guest, but not the guest of honor. Oh no, he was meant as “cannon fodder.”

  Actors are cattle and should be treated as such, Marcus thought. Was that really a Hitchcock quote or was that apocryphal? Part of the mythologizing and lionizing of a fine director who was an even finer showman?

  It didn’t matter, because right now Marcus felt like cattle.

  Blood Camp Con featured five guest stars, in addition to Ms. Clarissa Lee. Five supporting acts who were now all squeezed into a white van.

  It was a van that would have had plenty of room if one of the seats hadn’t been completely stripped of its upholstery, leaving just a rusty frame and springs behind.

  Classy, class-A accommodations all the way at this convention.

  Wedged between Gina Bright and Ivan Butinelli, Marcus was beginning to think he should have taken the messed up seat. Compared to being the meat in this white bread sandwich, Marcus would have preferred a few springs corkscrewing up his ass.

  Marcus was the tallest of the three, so that he was riding the middle seat of the van’s back row was a testament to how polite he was. He’d let Gina board the van first, with Butinelli holding out a hand and saying “after you.”

  Butinelli was either being a gentleman or didn’t want to sit next to Bright.

  He’d met both of them before, briefly, but for both of them briefly had been enough.

  He did know about them, because it was part of his business to know about them and partly unavoidable, with all the cons he did.

  Gina Bright had started out her career as a child star in a string of made-for-TV horror movies in the late seventies and early eighties, but would only refer to them as “psychological thrillers” after her breakout role. She was famous, but at conventions most casual fans knew to keep their distance. They all knew that she charged to take photos. Even if she wasn’t behind her table when you took one, she’d coax you in with an open arm only to shake you down after. Like Marcus, most of the fans were able to smell the phoniness on her. Or maybe it was plastic-bottle gin.

  Butinelli on the other hand—or elbowing into Marcus’s ribs, as it was—started in porn, tried out legitimate acting in a couple of straight-to-video movies, then went back to porn once it became chic. He had his own brand of vodka and Marcus imagined that the liquor tasted like Drakkar Noir and forged STD checkup papers.

  Butinelli regarded Gina Bright with an over-politeness that told Marcus he either really liked her or really didn’t. Either way there was a shared history there that Marcus didn’t want to be in the middle of. Even though he literally was in the middle of it at this moment.

  Riding in the van’s only functional second row seat was the eldest member of the group, Margery Clampton.

  Margery had been a contemporary of Julie Adams. But where Adams was going swimming with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a couple years later Margery was running for the hills pursued by irradiated centipedes. In bit roles Margery Clampton had shared the screen with John Agar and a young Vincent Price, but only the most diehard of nostalgic movie geeks would be able to name any of her starring roles.

  Time had forgotten Margery Clampton, and Marcus would have pitied her if she seemed to have a shred of self-awareness and didn’t strike him as (barely) latently racist.

  Riding shotgun was someone young who Marcus didn’t know. When they’d shaken hands in the airport parking lot she’d rattled a feature and TV credits to Marcus, but he hadn’t been familiar with any of her stuff.

  She was… damn. What was it? Tammy, but Tammy had been short for something… Tamera? That was enough, he didn’t need to know her full name. They weren’t here to make friends.

  Instead of meeting a new member of the mysterious MTY’s staff, it had been Michael Teeks himself who’d picked the group up from the airport. He was twenty minutes late, which was mildly concerning, and the van itself, too beat up to be a rental, was also a moderately strong red flag. But what was Teeks’ grand plan? Kidnap a van full of C-listers? One of them an octogenarian who spent their whole drive so far complaining about the heat when it was 68 degrees and overcast?

  Teeks’ brief welcome speech detailed how there would be two different cabins for the men and the women. After that, the van went quiet.

  Marcus closed his eyes. He wasn’t tired and wouldn’t be able to sleep, but it would help dissuade anyone from talking to him.

  That attempt to fake-sleep his way through the trip lasted about five minutes, when he heard someone up ahead of him clear their throat and turn in their seat.

  Tammy spoke.

  “So your agents hooked this up?”

  It wasn’t clear who she was asking, but Marcus recognized the eagerness in her voice. She wasn’t making small talk: she was taking the temperature of the talent in the room, possibly to see if she could make a connection and end up leapfrogging from one agent to another. If she had representation at all.

  There was a fine line between leaning into oncoming success and desperation, and if Marcus were to guess he would say that Tamera Whatshername seemed perfectly content with crossing it.

  Marcus opened his eyes to a squint, so he could continue to hide behind his eyelashes.

  Margery either didn’t hear Tammy or was deliberately ignoring her. The old woman continued to stare out the window.

  It was Butinelli who spoke up first. Not, Marcus suspected, because he had any sage advice but because Tammy was cute.

  “No, baby. I am my own people. In my opinion: that’s the only way to be. At a certain point.”

  It was much to Marcus’s shame that he recognized Butinelli’s distinctive accent. It wasn’t quite Italian and had a spoonful of 80s action movie Russian in it.

  The “at a certain point” comment probably sounded better in the porn star’s head than it did aloud, at least to Marcus. Butinelli wanted it to sound like: “once you reach a certain level” but to Marcus’s ears it was “once you sink low enough, you can manage your own career death-spiral.”

  God. He hated that he was here, hated this business.

  “I can’t help you either.” Gina said, seemingly prompted to enter the discussion by Butinelli’s advice.“I got rid of my team, too, everyone except my publicist.” She’d been playing with something inside her overlarge handbag for most of the trip, and from the smell of it, it was a flask.

  “Oh, okay,” Tammy said, turning back in the passenger’s side seat. “I don’t have anyone at the moment.”

  Marcus was just about to speak up, let it be known that he had been approached by Teeks in person, but then Teeks did it for him.

  “I hope this isn’t talking out of school for anyone else,” Teeks began, seeming to slip into an accent he hadn’t possessed when he’d talked to Marcus back in New Jersey.

  “Since MTY is a small company and we’re, understandably, trying to avoid getting SAG involved in our hirings: you were all targeted for your lack of representation. I mean, you were targeted because of your talents first and foremost. But not dealing with the guilds is good for us in that it keeps costs down, and good for all of you because…well…I’m not going to tell Uncle Sam what you’re getting paid if you don’t.”

  There was some polite laughter in the van, the loudest of it from poor, naïve Tammy, but Marcus didn’t participate. Instead he found himself having to force his jaw to unclench before speaking up.

  “Wait,” he started, popping his elbows free from where they had become wedged behind Gina Bright and Ivan Butinelli to lean forward. “Why would you need to bother with Screen Actor Guild wages if there’s no screen? Are you planning on filming us?”

  Maybe they had been shanghaied, but instead of a ransom they were all being brought to appear in some shitty movie under the false pretense that they were meeting up with fans.

  Teeks made a noise that wasn’t quite words, readjusted his grip on the steering wheel, and then spoke up.

  “I didn’t mean to get you excited, Marcus. We will be filming most
of the events, but the footage will not be distributed for any commercial reasons. Certain ticket packages included a souvenir DVD to be compiled once we’ve had a chance to go through all the footage. We’re talking about a very limited pressing, less than twenty copies. It’s all a part of what you’ll be compensated at the end of the weekend. And your advance.”

  Marcus let the explanation hang there for a second and then debated with himself whether he wanted to go to the mat over twenty DVDs.

  “Oh, that’s fine, I guess,” Marcus said.

  He looked over to Butinelli, who was scowling at him. The man who possessed a mushroomhead silhouette more famous than his jaw-line was giving Marcus a tsk-tsk for being so vulgar as to ask about their livelihoods.

  Marcus glanced to Gina, but there was no backup coming from that direction. She didn’t seem to be listening and just gave him a polite half-smile, the kind you give someone on the street when you’re not really looking to stop and talk.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t mention being filmed earlier. There is a provision about it in your contracts.” Teeks said. From Marcus’s vantage he could barely see the man, just half his face, the white of his shirt sleeve as he guided the wheel around into a turn-off.

  They were turning from the interstate to a smaller three-lane highway. Out the van’s windows, signs of civilization were sparse, but there were still a few other cars on the road, and the occasional water tower or electrical pole broke up the horizon.

  Tammy was the last to break the silence for the rest of the ride.

  “This is so exciting, isn’t it?” She didn’t turn in her seat, just spoke it into the windshield and let the words wash over them, like she knew no one but Teeks had a chance of seconding her emotion.

  Chapter Ten

  Clarissa Lee ran her hands around the edge of the bathroom mirror. She tried to pull it towards herself, either to adjust it or open a hidden medicine cabinet, but brought her fingers back holding nothing but dust.