by Mike Leon
She drops in front of the toilet, pulling back her hair to vomit. She hasn’t eaten and there isn’t much to come up, but she needs to get out what she can. When it’s over, she sits on the dusty floor next to the toilet and cries.
Lily only saw for a second, but she can’t make the image go away. Every time she blinks she sees it. She sees the eyes, the blood, what was wrapped around her neck . . .
She cries. All she can do is cry.
It takes her a moment to notice her phone ringing. She pulls it from her bra and looks at the screen. **MOM** flashes on the display. Probably wondering where she is. She taps the answer button. She needs her mother right now.
“Mom?”
“Are you ready to die, Lily?” It’s the chainsaw growl of Victor’s voice.
Lily screams. Not this. Not her mother.
“Oh God,” she shrieks. “You murdered Amy!”
His laugh is a gruff fleeting thing that ends almost as soon as it begins.
“I got bored with her,” he says. “Next it’s Mommy’s turn.”
“Oh no,” Lily cries. “Please don’t.”
“That’s what your friend said. She said it over and over—for a very long time.”
“She didn’t do anything to you!”
Victor cackles like a madman. “No, she didn’t. Now I have a new deal for you, baby girl. The Galleria. Noon. By the main entrance. Tell my brother nothing. He’s too much of a nuisance.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“But you have to. How else do you think this ends? He couldn’t help that bimbo in the video store. He can’t help your mother, and he can’t help you. Bring me the case, and you can live. If you’re not there, I’ll pour bleach down Mommy’s throat and then I’ll come for you. I’ll find you, and when I finish twisting and carving your body, you’ll choose death over the living hell I leave you in.”
Lily’s mother screams into the phone. It disconnects.
The power clicks off in the whole video store. Lily is plunged into darkness. She waits for the stockroom flood lights to come on, then remembers she never replaced the batteries even after Amy asked her three times. She didn’t think it was important. It’s not like the power goes out that often.
She wonders then why the power went out now. There isn’t a thunderstorm outside or anything. Something is wrong.
She stumbles back into the stockroom. She takes three careful steps into the room before she hears it: the rise and fall of breathing; quiet, but not in her head. Is there someone in here with her?
“Sid?” she says. No response.
She knows she’ll never make it through the jungle of broken movie displays on the floor back here without tripping and injuring herself. Duh. Her iPhone has a backlight. She pushes the power and spins it around to illuminate the way ahead.
Something shuffles on the floor. There’s someone in the room with her.
Quickly, she turns around. The light of the phone display illuminates something black and moving, fabric. A curtain? A shirt?
A screaming skull.
The hulking monster swings a machete at Lily. She ducks, feeling the blade buzz the top of her head. It sticks in a shelving unit beside her.
“Flesh for my hunger!” bellows the Ghoul.
Lily fills her lungs to scream, but the monster lashes out and snatches her throat. She feels her feet leave the ground as he hoists her into the air with one hand. She can’t breathe. Her legs flail wildly. She grabs his arm and tries to push herself free from his grasp, but she can’t.
The monster bashes her against the wall, rattling her brain. Her back throbs like she’s been stabbed. She punches the Ghoul in his rubber skull face, but it’s like punching King Kong. He doesn’t even flinch.
He clamps his other hand down around her throat and squeezes. She feels her eyes bulge like they’re about to burst from her head. The room, already black, somehow becomes darker. Her legs are like rubber. She can’t move them anymore. She reaches out for anything she can.
“Meat,” he says. She hears it muffled, as if through a pillow or a wall. Not like this. Not like this. It rolls through her dying brain as she begins to slip away. Not like this. Not blind with agony, struggling to move her dead limbs. Her body feels broken, maybe severed from her head.
“Cut!” someone says.
The world becomes a black and white blur. The stockroom gains a stillness that should be impossible for objects that were never in motion.
“You were great, kiddo,” says the voice. It’s nasal, with a slight lisp. She knows it from somewhere. “I think we got it.”
She lifts her head from the cold concrete floor and is blinded by a powerful light. Lily lifts a hand to block out the burning beam shining in her eyes. Beyond that is a face, someone in a collapsible cloth chair. He has a receding hair line, nubby little teeth, pointed nose, enormous Hapsburg jaw—it’s Quentin Tarantino.
“And that’s a wrap, everybody,” he says.
“What do you mean?” Lily asks.
“It means it’s over.” He shrugs. “Now we go to post.”
“What about me?”
“You? You’re done.”
“You mean I’m dead . . .”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to be dead.”
“It’s not really up to me. I have to be true to the characters—true to the story.”
“Why?” she cries. “Why like this?”
“Because it’s fun!”
“It wasn’t fun for me!”
“Well, I gotta hand it to you, kiddo. Strangulation is hard. I never quite buy it in anything. That’s why I strangled Diane Kruger myself on Inglourious Basterds.”
“You’re not really Quentin Tarantino, are you?”
“You know exactly what I am. I’m not really into the Ingmar Bergman look anymore. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey spoiled it. Would you prefer more of a Neil Gaiman interpretation?”
“No. You can’t have me.”
“Aw, kiddo, you know what you are. You’re not the final girl. You’re the slutty friend. You said it yourself.”
“No, it’s not true! I didn’t know. That’s not what I think!”
“You’re not doing anything to drive the plot. This story doesn’t need you.”
“Please! I’m not worthless! I don’t think that anymore!”
“Hey while you’re here, you mind if I give you a foot massage?”
Lily gasps to life. She’s on the floor in the stockroom, facedown. She pushes against it and forces her wobbling legs straight. She trips on some signage in the dark and falls again, but she doesn’t care. She tumbles over a pile of steel peg hooks and pulls open the door to the store.
She runs, screaming, panting, crying from the back. The front room is lit by the lights of the strip mall parking lot and Sid is a black shadow silhouetted against the store windows ahead of her. She shrieks at him as she passes.
“Run!” she screams. “Run!”
Sid gives her a confused glance and then turns to see the Ghoul standing framed by the stockroom doorway.
The monster howls as he pulls the yellow DeWALT® power drill, which is perfect for projects at home or professional construction, from his left eye socket, tossing it aside. An eyeball comes with it.
The Ghoul snatches Sid up off the ground and bowls him into Lily. He smashes into her legs, and the two tumble to the ground.
Sid rolls to his feet and unshoulders the rifle. He levels it at the Ghoul and unloads a magazine into the monster. The Ghoul seems only slightly annoyed.
“Why do I still carry this thing?” Sid says, tossing the gun to the ground and pulling a KA-BAR knife. He shakes his head, then charges full bore at the Ghoul, roaring and bearing his teeth. He leaps into the air and drives his knife into the monster’s face, burying the blade deep in the creature’s brain.
The monster reels a step, then another, dazed, before falling to the floor at Sid’s feet. Sid looks down at it for a moment, then kick
s it.
He turns and walks back to Lily.
“You okay?” he asks, pulling her up from the carpet.
“He has my mom!” Lily screams. “He has her! He’s going to kill her just like Amy!”
“Hey,” Sid scolds her. “You need to stay calm.”
He takes her hands in his, but she rips them away and swats hysterically at him as he tries to grab them again.
“Why didn’t you save her?!” she screams.
“There was nothing I could—”
Lily punches him in the chest. It’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit. He could’ve saved her if he was faster, if he didn’t argue with her.
“No! That’s not how it works!” she shrieks. “You were supposed to save the girl!”
“This isn’t a movie, Lily,” Sid says. “People die.”
“You’re still alive! Amy’s dead! Is my mom next? You’re just gonna let him kill her?”
The KA-BAR knife clanks to the ground behind them. Lily turns and screams.
The Ghoul stands again, having plucked the knife from his head.
“Aw, what the fuck?” Sid laments. “I stuck a knife in his brain!”
Sid kicks the Ghoul in the testicles. It has no effect.
“That’s different,” he says. Then the Ghoul sledgehammers him right through a wire shelving display of movies labeled Employee Favorites. The rack collapses on top of him.
He doesn’t get back up.
The Ghoul turns to Lily. She screams as those outstretched gauntlets come for her again—moving to crush her throat until she passes into void. She won’t die like that. Not like that.
She runs down the drive aisle through the center of the store and takes a turn into Action. She hears the Ghoul stomping after her. The monster hurries now, moving faster than she would have guessed he could. Her heart races with fear. He’ll catch her. He’ll choke her again.
Lily turns a corner and tiptoes into Horror. She crouches on the floor and listens to locate the thing.
The rising and falling rasps of his breathing intensify as he closes in. She comes up with an idea. Reaching above her shoulder, she quietly plucks a copy of Friday the 13th from the shelf. She tosses it up and over into the next aisle. It comes down on the floor with a loud clatter.
She hears the monster spin to examine the fallen cassette tape. This is her chance. She needs to go for the front door.
Summoning all her courage, she makes a break for it. Sprinting as fast as she can down the center aisle, she makes for the door. She closes in fast, refusing to look back. All she can do is drive forward. She raises her hand to slam down the release lever to open the locked door.
She trips. No. Something trips her.
“No!” she screams, tumbling to the floor. She smacks, shoulder first, into the carpet. Her feet are somehow entangled. She’s being dragged.
She raises her head to see the Ghoul, standing in the center aisle, winding a thick black cord around his arm to reel her in. Her feet are wrapped in some kind of weighted bolas. She claws the carpet desperately as the Ghoul drags her closer. He raises Sid’s big black knife over her. She shrieks and closes her eyes, waiting to feel the sensation of cold steel driven through her body.
It never comes.
She opens her eyes to see the Ghoul balancing the knife in his giant hand, looking it over as though it isn’t worthy somehow. He dumps it on the floor behind him and draws a huge rusty hacksaw from a sheath on his back. She struggles free of the cables, but he steps on her pelvis and flattens her against the floor. He must weigh six-hundred pounds. She thinks her hips might crack under him.
“No! No!” she cries. Tears stream down her face as the monster places the teeth of the saw against her exposed midriff.
She screams so loud her lungs burn and her throat gives out.
Something blocky and black smashes down over the Ghoul’s head. Glass shatters. He’s wearing the store TV like a space helmet. The beast gurgles as a sizzling electric shock violently rattles him to the floor.
Sid stands behind the fallen monster. He reaches out and pulls Lily to her feet.
“Fuck you!” she curses, violently kicking at the monster’s ribs until she falls into Sid’s arms. She presses her face against his chest as she catches her breath. “He was gonna saw me in half.”
“You gonna be okay?” he says.
“Yeah,” she answers. “I, um, I dropped my cell phone in the back . . .”
“I’ll get it.”
“Okay.” Lily glimpses Amy’s motionless foot around the corner of the counter. She closes her eyes. She can’t be here with the body any longer. “I’ll, um, I’ll be in the car.”
INT. VIDEO TIME - NIGHT
Lily’s iPhone is on the floor underneath a fallen pile of acrylic sign holders. Most of them are broken and jagged. Either the Ghoul stepped on them or Lily fell on them. The girl should be dead. Her eyes were filled with blood and her neck was wrapped in a purple collar of bruising. She got lucky.
Sid picks up the iPhone and flicks the display on. Somehow, it is not broken. He turns and heads for the front of the store.
As he nears the front counter, he notices something amiss. The Ghoul’s body is gone.
The monster hisses from behind him, stepping out of the action movie aisle.
“Meat!” it says.
Sid rolls his eyes.
“I don’t even care anymore,” Sid says. He flips the monster his middle finger and continues on his way.
“Meat?” the Ghoul says.
Sid walks out of the video store. He stuffs the iPhone in his pants pocket, walking around toward the rear of the building.
The Ghoul stomps along behind him.
“Meat! Meat!” the monster repeats.
Suddenly, blinding headlights illuminate them both. Sid squints in the face of the burning brights as an engine revs loudly.
Lily’s purple Malibu lurches forward, squealing tires and trailing smoke through the blacktop. Sid steps out of the way and the car zooms past him, crashing into the massive monster on his tail.
The Ghoul wraps around the front bumper, dragged halfway under the car as it roars toward the brick wall next to the video store front.
Crunch! The front end of the car smashes into the wall. The hood curls upward as groaning metal twists around the monster’s chest. Smoke pours from the engine compartment as the beast bellows with fury and pounds his fists on the hood.
Lily steps out of the car.
“Did I get him?”
Sid shrugs. “More or less.”
“What the fuck is that thing?” Lily says.
Sid leaps onto the hood of the car in front of the Ghoul. The monster lashes out, reaching to grab him with flailing fingers. Sid’s hand shoots out and snatches the rubber mask, pulling it away with a quick jerk.
The face underneath is a raw and bloody mess of ground burger. Pointed shark-like teeth form a wide Glasgow smile, and black muck squirts from his gaping eye socket.
“It looks like what would happen if the Cloverfield monster made a baby with Freddie Kruger,” Lily says.
It really is something awful. Sid never saw the Ghoul’s actual face before, but it suddenly makes perfect sense why they keep a mask on him all the time.
Sid opens the rear driver’s side door and reaches into the back seat. He drags the MacGuffin out and passes it to Lily.
“Take this and go stand over there,” he says.
“Why?” she asks, stepping cautiously away from him. “What’re you going to do?”
“I’m gonna blow up the car.”
He levels a pistol at the gas tank.
“Sid,” she says. “That won’t work. They proved on Mythbusters that—”
Boom! The car explodes when he shoots the gas tank. He glimpses Lily shielding her eyes as the blast sweeps her hair back.
“Okay, then . . .” she says.
Sid watches as the Ghoul burns. Flames tickle the sky and the air stinks of melting rub
ber. The monster’s screams fill his ears for some time before they finally die away, and the flailing slows to nothing.
“The cops will be here soon,” Sid says. “I need to know everything he said to you.”
He turns. Lily is no longer there.
Amy’s car lights up and the engine starts. He watches curiously as the car backs out of the space.
“Hey!” Sid says. “Where are you going?”
The car switches into drive. Sid runs toward it.
“Stop!” he yells. “Don’t do it! He’ll kill you!”
He watches as Lily peels out of the parking lot in Amy’s car and zooms off into the dark.
“Stupid girl,” he says. “Fuck.”
Cha-chink. A shotgun pumps behind him. Sid turns to face the ninja and Helen Anderson. She holds the shotgun. The ninja’s hand is at his sword hilt.
“What do you two want?” Sid says. He isn’t scared. This is just more annoying bullshit to pile on with the rest.
“Where’s she taking the case, Kill Team?” Helen says.
“Fuck if I know.”
INT. LILY’S HOUSE – NIGHT
The front door splinters off its hinges and flops to the floor with a loud thud that echoes through the house. The ninja’s talent for kicking doors down is impressive. It fell straight to the floor like the hinges were made from butter. The bloody scrawled WhORE faces up at them.
Sid enters first, expecting nothing, but ready for anything. He swings his rifle around to cover the corners. The house is a mess. Someone was here before them.
“Lily?” Helen calls. Sid doesn’t like her shouting out. It gives away their position.
Sid moves farther down the hallway into the kitchen. A table lies on its side and a bowl of cereal has spilled on the floor next to it. Someone has sliced jagged lines down the walls and punched through them in places.
“It looks like the Manson family was here,” Helen says. She pokes her boot toe at a shattered mass market print of Marilyn Monroe lying on the floor.
