The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror

by Adam Cesare

  “No, but how many of them can we stand to go missing?”

  This gave him pause.

  Daddy Teeks wrinkled his nose at this and she could see him trying to think of a reply that made sense. Yes, at first they had only been selecting attendees who didn’t have any families or strong community connections (at least from what they could tell online). But they’d vastly underestimated what the demand to attend Blood Camp Con would be among married men and twentysomethings who still lived at home.

  Unlike their guests, who had all been selected through a much more rigorous screening process, a good percentage of campers were living much less invisible lives. Some of those men in white masks had people out in the real world who cared about them.

  “Five minutes and I’ll run back here,” Kimberly said. “No one will follow me. I’m very fast.”

  Daddy Teeks rubbed his temples, watched on screen as Butinelli felled another camper, a girl this time. Who knew that a lifetime of fucking and stage fighting would translate to this kind of martial ability? Even though there had been no actual betting, she’d still gone out of her way to make odds for the “Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?” Poll. It was only for fun, but Kimberly had put Ivan Butinelli down at 4:1.

  2:1 had probably been closer to the truth.

  Keith Lumbra winced at another savage blow delivered with the stone. The improvised weapon was now so slick with blood that Butinelli was holding it in both hands to keep it from slipping away, like a bar of soap.

  “Fine, go but do it quickly and be careful,” Daddy Teeks finally said. “Send them all to the Head Counselor’s Cabin if you can.”

  She already knew what she had to do. And she was already halfway out the door before he’d given her permission.

  *

  Ivan saw the black T-shirts and white masks around him turning to react before he could make sense of the words.

  It was a female voice, high and shrill, a girl’s falsetto.

  Oh baby, gonna make you scream.

  “No,” she yelled. “Stop it!”

  Gonna make you cream. You’ll like it. Oooo, yeah. That’s good.

  All of his fluids were pumping and the thing that most reminded him of was fucking.

  He felt the drip of his own blood against his face like a strong sweat, but he did not feel the pain anymore. He was in the zone.

  Ivan pushed the fat fuck’s head into the ground with one hand and used the side of the rock to flatten his ear against his skull. He hit the tubby kid until blood welled up from his ear canal, the final toot becoming a little geyser.

  After that, he decided to stop and move onto whoever else was thinking of coming within swinging distance.

  “You’re all on camera and we can see your numbers!” the girl yelled out, closer now. “Don’t hurt him!”

  For all the participants of the brawl, it was like she was speaking in code. But a moment after they had a chance to decipher the words, the shadows around him began to recede.

  Ivan whirled and there was a girl there, pushing through the loosened circle. The crowd was already breaking up as campers turned tail to run from him.

  Her?! She’d saved him. But wasn’t she also in on it?

  The blood that had leaked down and blinded his left eye had stopped stinging like salt water, but maybe that numbness was a bad thing because now he could only see out of the right.

  You like it rough. Dirty girl. Mind if I choke you? Knock on your back door?

  Ivan wondered how long he’d been packing the erection he felt rubbing up against his leg. He stood from his knees and felt it poking at him, the head rotating. Was the hard-on an automatic reaction to the exertion or had he actually been turned on by fighting for his life against a bunch of mallrats and cosplayers?

  “Oh Jesus. Are you okay?” she said, giving him a once over. “Please, please, we have to get out of here,” she said, beginning to sob before the second “please.”

  “You,” Ivan heard himself saying. He raised his stone but realized halfway up he was too tired to wield it effectively, so he let his arm fall and the momentum spun him so he caught a glimpse of the orange sun before hitting the ground.

  “I had nothing to do with this. I just want to go home,” the girl, Kimberly, said. She started to cry as she kneeled down to cradle him.

  Where had his rock gone? The fuzzy thought came and went as he realized he was safe. For the moment.

  He let her help him up, his legs and arms somehow able to work even though his mind felt diffuse and sugary, like cotton candy pulled to its most fibrous and allowed to melt.

  And as the two of them marched—not towards the road but deeper into the camp—he was almost sure that there was a crack in the air, like distant thunder. It was a clear afternoon.

  Chapter Twenty

  Back in the cabin, when nobody was looking, Gina had helped herself to the last of her vodka.

  When she’d finished it, she wondered if it really had been a secret stash, because she’d thought she had brought enough for the weekend. But it was only Friday and already her second plastic flask was empty. The flasks were sold online and designed to help kids on spring break smuggle cheap booze onto cruises to avoid pay bars, but the containers were lighter than bottles and if you checked your bags on a flight then the TSA wouldn’t bother them.

  She would have shared, but there wasn’t much left and she had needed the drink.

  Now she was wishing she’d shared. Gina Bright had maybe over-medicated with vodka.

  “It’s so hot,” she said between wheezes. She wasn’t exactly trashed, that wasn’t really a state she could enter anymore, and it had been years since she’d vomited from nausea brought on by drunkenness. When she was plastered she thought this resilience to getting sick was a good thing—that it meant she wasn’t drinking as much as she used to—but when she sobered she realized that her supernatural tolerance just meant that her alcoholism was entering its final descent. The landing gear on Gina Bright’s life was down and ready for tarmac.

  Neither of her co-stars responded to what she said about the heat. They were both too busy combing through the cabin. Clarissa Lee took the rifle down from over the fireplace and pulled back the lever to reveal an empty chamber.

  “There,” Clarissa said, indicating the desk wedged in one corner, “the drawer.”

  Gina lifted up the fabric of her shirt to fan the sweat from the small of her back.

  Since Clarissa hadn’t said which drawer to check, Marcus Lang started pulling open desk and nightstand drawers at random.

  Gina tried to take in her surroundings as he did, but found it too dark in the room. She removed her sunglasses and found it easier to see where she was. Clarissa Lee’s lodgings were much better than what Gina was sharing with the rest of the girls. Or. Had been sharing with the rest of the girls.

  Your room doesn’t matter now, some floaty, rational part of her brain started to remind herself, now that they’ve started killing you all. But the voice was quickly squelched as Gina’s eyes focused on the easy chair, then the frilly duvet cover bunched at the end of the bed, and finally the stone fireplace.

  Twenty years of losing work because the producers wanted a bigger star than Gina Bright, sometimes settling for Clarissa Lee, and this was where her life was going to come to a close: in a world where Clarissa Lee was still demonstrably a bigger draw. At least among the horror movie crowd.

  A pocket of gas opened somewhere inside Gina and worked its way through chambers of her stomach and gut. Maybe she was drunk enough to puke.

  “I’m just going to get some water from the bathroom,” Gina said. She said it to no one, apparently, judging by their lack of reactions. They’d written her off. And they’d probably done it with good reason, as they must have known she’d been drinking. But that didn’t stop her from resenting them.

  She wiped a hand over her forehead and was surprised to find her bangs plastered there, sopping wet. That much salty wetness co
uldn’t have been good for her dye job.

  On uneasy feet, she navigated around Clarissa Lee’s unmade bed and into the private cabin’s small bathroom. Oo la la. Her own bathroom.

  “Here, I got them!” Marcus yelled from behind her, the clatter of rifle shells in a cardboard box filling the room.

  Gina Bright closed the bathroom door against their celebration.

  The cool water from the tap helped focus her vision and calm her stomach. And so did the fact that although Clarissa Lee had been given a nicer cabin all to herself, her bathroom was still as cramped and unspectacular as the one Gina had been sharing with Margery and Tammy.

  The washroom smelled like construction and there was dust from unfinished drywall ringing the sink fixtures. If this was what “recently refurbished” looked like, then she would have hated to see the old bathroom.

  Gina bent, ran some more cool water over her hands, and circled a wet thumb around the faucet to clean away the dust.

  There: that was better.

  She looked up at the mirror just in time to watch her own reflection warble and then burst outwards.

  Glass and two large, gloved hands shot out to meet her. The hands grabbed her sweat-slick hair in strong fingers and pulled her neck down to meet the teeth formed by the shattered mirror.

  *

  Guns, like cars, were not something Clarissa Lee was able to see the appeal in.

  She understood that there was a big market for these interests, for learning every piece of minutia one could about a favorite weapon or foreign automobile. But none of it interested her.

  Even still, she knew where she’d recognized the gun from, now that she was cradling the weapon in her arms and pulling open the chamber.

  This was a gun that had been a standard among hunters before she’d first met it, but was now famous in horror circles after she’d used it onscreen in the final act of Death Birth to send her own mutant child to oblivion, in the process opening a dimensional rift and ushering in hell on earth. No, that movie had not had an upbeat Hollywood ending, and that was why many fans liked it.

  The rifle was a Winchester Model 70 with standard bolt action and added scope.

  “Can I see it?” Marcus asked, his palms out to her.

  It was a natural question. Over the last few hours, Marcus had confidently slipped into the role of leader for their little group. But that didn’t mean that he was allowed to carry the gun, her gun. Especially after asking in such a half-hearted way, like it were only natural that she—the damsel—would hand it over.

  “You can see with your eyes, not with your hands,” Clarissa said, meaner than she wanted to, then added: “I know how to use it.”

  And she did. Death Birth had been Boyd Haight’s first modestly budgeted picture and his last with Clarissa. Her ex-husband, perhaps already over the tipping point of self-indulgence that would lead to their divorce and the diminishing quality of his later studio films, had requested Clarissa go through two weeks of weapons training during pre-production. Her character was the wife of an avid hunter, thus needed to know how to handle the weapon. In the film, the subtext ended up being that: as macho as her husband was, he was still capable of being cuckolded by dark supernatural forces. It was a slight tweak on Rosemary’s Baby’s marriage dynamics, but still more than a cheap rip-off.

  Boyd had made the case that she should know how to handle a weapon. She hadn’t paid much attention then, but it really was all muscle memory, once the Winchester was back in her hands.

  “Cartridges,” Clarissa said, holding her hand out.

  She could tell that taking charge and refusing to give up the gun was doing something to Marcus, squashing a fledgling crush, perhaps? That would be flattering, she thought, giving Marcus a look and allowing it to be a little victory in the horror. Not bad for an old lady.

  Whatever his hang-up was didn’t matter. He gave her the box and she opened it, crossing the room to spread the bullets—ahem—the cartridges, out on the desk. There were five. Five rounds of Winchester .243 caliber ammunition, one round shy of the rifle’s full capacity if you kept one chambered. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about reloading.

  It was amazing how the training she didn’t think she’d been paying attention to came back to her, nearly thirty years after her shooting lessons. It was the only time she’d ever fired live ammunition, and she prayed that she wasn’t loading in blanks right now. She wasn’t that much of an expert that she could tell the difference between real bullets and fakes.

  Before she began to guide the first round into the chamber, she looked up and checked out the window.

  The action was interrupted by the sound of glass breaking in the bathroom. Gina Bright started to scream and was abruptly stopped.

  “Hold on!” Marcus yelled, diving over the bed to the bathroom door and grabbing the knob.

  “Don’t,” Clarissa screamed at him, meaning to say “Don’t open that fucking door yet, wait for me” as she fumbled to get a second round in the gun.

  But it was too late.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In Rory’s opinion, archery kills were completely underrated and underutilized.

  True, there were slasher movies in which the killers used guns. Think of the shotgun blast to Tom Savini’s head in Maniac. But those were few and far between, and when guns did get drawn by a slasher, it felt like cheating.

  Bows and arrows didn’t feel like cheating, at least not to Rory. He’d used bows to hunt, and the things were damn difficult to get a handle on. It took a combination of upper body strength, breathing, and steady hands to send an arrow where you wanted it, even if you were using an expensive, state-of-the-art compound bow.

  Jason had hand-delivered an arrow once, but it was only in the remake that he ever shot a bow. As much shit as that movie got, that didn’t mean an arrow still wasn’t a cool way to get a kill.

  And that went double if the bow was used to deliver a sudden, unexpected death with not even a musical cue to alert the audience of danger. No shrill piano jiggling, just a thunk.

  There was something so surprising about a well-placed arrow.

  He bet Marcus Lang would agree.

  Lang opened the bathroom door and his eyes went wide at all the blood that must have been running down from the bottom of the mirror over both the sink and tile. Rory had dragged Gina Bright’s neck down into the glass and sawed, stopping only when he’d hit bone. After that was done he’d let her fall away into the bathroom when he heard someone coming.

  Marcus Lang looked up from the mess and through the window made by the broken mirror, straight into Rory’s face.

  Rory guessed it was dark enough in the hidden room that Mr. Lang couldn’t really see him. The small room was completely black except for the red LED on the camcorder.

  It would be best to put him down before Mr. Lang could see what Rory was preparing to do.

  He loosed an arrow and it hit Marcus Lang at the base of the neck, to the left side, the shaft gliding neatly up to the fletching.

  Rory had meant to put the arrow through his brainpan, but like he’d said: bows were tricky, even at close range.

  Mr. Lang crashed against the half-open door, back and away.

  Time to clean em up, Rory thought with grim satisfaction.

  *

  Keith Lumbra was hurting.

  He’d wanted to ask Teeks for another Advil, but that was before Kimberly had made a scene and left the safety of the control room to go unfuck the situation that had developed with the porn star.

  Now may not be the best time to put in a special request. Teeks seemed preoccupied with worry…off his game.

  “What is she doing?” Teeks asked, but the question must have been rhetorical because they could both plainly see what Kimberly was doing. She was helping Ivan Butinelli get to his feet after chasing off the majority of the campers.

  “And what’s going on—holy shit! Is that two kills?” Teeks was now watching the bottom row of moni
tors. “Tell me we have coverage, Lumbra.”

  “I’ve been recording the cabin, main room and bathroom. And Rory’s POV is still set to broadcast straight to the second tower even when it’s off-screen. We’ll certainly be able to cut something together,” Lumbra said, feeling too much like a hero for someone who was bragging about getting comprehensive ‘coverage’ of two murders. As if it were his conscience’s way of punishing him, his frontal lobe throbbed when he was through talking. His headache hadn’t gotten any better once Kimberly left.

  For the last few days, Keith had been trying to throw the pronoun ‘we’ into any statements that referenced the future. He was doing this to gauge Teeks’ reaction. He needed to see whether the man intended there to be a future for Keith.

  Unfortunately, so far he hadn’t been able to tell anything. Teeks and Rory could have been planning to kill him as soon as filming was wrapped or they could intend to keep him around for the second annual Blood Camp Con.

  “Actually. Lang’s still moving,” Teeks said, leaning in over the monitors for a closer look. Keith watched him without making it obvious he was looking directly at him.

  They were coming to the end of the game much earlier than anticipated. Keith was less interested in what was going on with the camp and more with how he would go about executing the dire endgame decision he’d reached only seconds ago.

  He’d never witnessed Michael Teeks this focused. Never this out of control. Add to that how occupied Rory was, not to mention far away from the control room...

  And then thinking about how alone they now were, in here without Kimberly…

  Teeks looked over at him. His boss had been saying something while Keith had been daydreaming.

  Keith forced himself to focus on his lips.

  “The campers, stupid,” Teeks repeated. “They’re migrating from Osprey to Lee’s cabin and for some reason Kimberly’s after them. Even though the fucking gun’s about to go off.” Teeks pointed down at the top row of the keyboard, to the row of numbers and cameras Lumbra needed to dial in. “Follow them, asshole!”