The Late Night Horror Show (36 page)

Blaine grinned. “Oh, she’ll believe it when she feels it for herself.”

Then they were both laughing.

Lashon choked back another sob and glared at them. “I hope you both rot in hell.”

Heidi giggled. “They always say shit like that sooner or later. Never stops being fucking funny.”

Blaine’s reply to that was more laughter.

Then Heidi slapped his chest with the back of a hand. “Enough. Let’s do this bitch.”

Lashon cringed and tried to scoot backward as the leering siblings came at her with grasping hands.

The nails were too long and thick to extract from the table, at least with his hands in such a mangled condition. But there was one other possible solution. It would mean even more nerve-shredding pain, but what was more pain to him at this point? Part of his face had been cut away. The shredded, bloody flesh framing his mouth was a raw, twitching mass of live-wire nerves and misery. Every twitch of his mouth or facial muscles sent countless more jolts of punishing agony sizzling through him.

There could be no level of pain higher than what he was already experiencing.

So fuck it.

John set his teeth and began working his hands side to side, digging the heads of the nails deeper into his flesh. It hurt. More than he’d anticipated. But he kept working at it. He meant to do this thing, regardless of the cost. And after a while it began to work. The wounds in his hands opened wider and he began to pull his hands upward again. The nail heads sank into the meat of his hands and scraped against brittle bones as his hands began to slide up the shafts of the nails.

His hands came free with a sickeningly moist sound.

The pain was incredible. Had he thought he’d reached the upper limits of his pain threshold? Really? How delusional. Because he had been seriously fucking wrong. His hands felt as if they were on fire.
Again.
Even so, he experienced an accompanying thrill of exhilaration. He had done it! He was fucking
free!

But the sense of accomplishment was short-lived. The much bigger task—saving the girl—was still ahead of him. And it still looked impossible, even in light of the amazing thing he’d already done. There were two of them. Two healthy, whole, completely nuts young people. And he was just one much-weakened, not-exactly-whole middle-aged wife-killer. The odds against success were steep. To understate on an epic level.

He would try anyway.

What else was left for him?

The cleaver Heidi had used to take his fingers sat at the edge of the table, where she had abandoned it in the wake of the girl’s gun-blazing arrival. John reached for it with his left hand—the one with the most fingers remaining—and picked it up. It was wet with his blood and almost slid from the three fingers the hand still possessed. But he curled those fingers as tightly as he could and maintained his grip on the handle.

Next, he slid out of his chair—careful not to scoot it backward on the floor, for fear of making noise—and began a slow, careful approach toward the open cellar door, through which he still heard the siblings screaming and laughing at the girl he meant to rescue.
 

When he reached the door, he poked one eye around the jamb and peered down into the cellar. Though she was wobbling badly, the brother and sister had the girl up on her feet now and were tossing her back and forth between them, alternately shoving her and backhanding her across the face. They taunted her with dark promises of the nasty things they planned to do to her and screamed the vilest insults John had ever heard.
 

Many of the worst came from Heidi, which didn’t surprise him. She had orchestrated his own torture, after all. He wanted to run screaming down there and hack her into a million little pieces with the cleaver. But the one called Blaine had the gun tucked inside the waistband of his jeans. So, though it frustrated him to no end, he would have to wait for an opening.

He could only hope there would eventually
be
such an opening.

And then, like a miracle, one arrived.

The brother and sister eventually tired of smacking the girl around and started talking about getting her up on one of the meat hooks. Some debate regarding how to do this ensued. Neither sibling was tall or strong enough to do the deed on their own. They would have to work in tandem. Heidi ordered Blaine to head back up to the kitchen to fetch a stepstool stored in the pantry.

Had he still been capable of it, John might have smiled then.

Instead, he stepped back and waited for the brother to come up the steps.

The paralyzing terror Ben had displayed prior to wading into the fray was displaced by screaming, savage fury. He punched zombie after zombie and bowled over others by knocking some of the larger ones into the ones behind them. Jason fought with equal levels of ferocity and desperation. Brix did what she could once the Glock’s clip was empty, but she didn’t possess a comparable level of strength. Still, she managed to contribute as they worked their way around to the other side of the building, where Ben’s car was parked. They were making progress.
 

She caught a glimpse of the blue Firebird he’d said would be in the last slot by the sidewalk. So close, but still so far away, with so many zombies remaining in their path. Even in the thick of battle, she had to wonder where they had all come from so suddenly. It was almost as if they had all been hiding out somewhere nearby, perhaps inside the neighboring buildings, just biding their time until some secret signal let them know it was time to show up for the climactic zombie battle scene.

She felt the outstretched fingertips of a zombie touch her from behind and wheeled about to slam her fist into the space where she assumed the thing’s chin would be. But the zombie was too tall, many inches above six feet. Her fist bounced harmlessly off its desiccated chest. The big zombie reached for her head with one of its oversized hands. Brix did the only thing she could think of by kicking out at one of its knees. There was a crack of splintering bone and the thing went toppling over. Though the giant was an impressive size—to say the least—it had been in a more advanced state of decay than many of its undead brethren.

Jason screamed something at her.

She turned away from the crippled giant and discovered that she was surrounded by living dead. Panic burned inside her at the sight of all those open mouths and teeth and outstretched, questing hands. The moans of the zombies rose to a higher, louder pitch. They seemed to sense that they had her and would soon be feasting on another fresh meal.

Then the one directly in front of her was yanked backward and slung to the ground. She saw Ben’s intent face appear through the gap as he urged her forward with a desperate hand gesture. Brix didn’t need any extra encouragement. She shot through the gap before it could close again and followed Ben as they hurried to catch up to Jason, who was only a dozen yards from the Firebird.

Brix tugged at Ben’s shoulder. “Your keys. I’ll make a run for the car while you guys hold these fuckers off.”

Ben dug them out of a hip pocket and tossed them to her.

Brix caught the keys on the fly and did the only thing she could—she rammed straight into the crowd of zombies still standing in their way, shouldering them aside like a fullback on a football field. It worked. She managed to bull her way through the tightest press of living dead bodies and slipped on through to the other side. There were still other zombies between her and the car, but she easily eluded them by zigging and zagging across the parking lot en route to the Firebird.

She flipped hurriedly through the keys as she reached the driver’s side door. The motherfucker had a bunch of goddamn keys. Too many. It was like a maintenance man’s key ring, for fuck’s sake. Luckily, though, she was able to quickly identify what had to be the key that would open the old car. It was significantly longer than the rest of them. She jammed it into the lock and gave it a twist.

The door popped open.

She couldn’t resist a shout of jubilation.

Fuck yeah!

She dropped into the car behind the steering wheel, yanked the door shut, and leaned across the seat to unlock the other door. A glance at the rearview mirror as she slipped the key inside the ignition showed that Jason and Ben had elected to emulate her near-suicidal plunge straight through the thick of the zombies. She held her breath a moment, waiting to see if they would emerge through to the other side.

They did.

Hallelujah!

Brix fired up the engine and put the car in gear as the guys came racing across the parking lot toward her. Jason reached the Firebird first. He got the door open on the passenger side and came barreling into the front seat of the car. Ben, who now had a deep, oozing gash down his right arm, shoved the seat forward and dove into the back.

Jason pulled the door shut and looked at her.
“Go! Fucking go!”

Brix didn’t need to be told again.

She stomped on the gas and the Firebird went flying backward. Its rear end collided with a couple of zombies, knocking them over as she hit the brake pedal and changed gears. Another burst of gas and they were out in the street and speeding away from the Boro Bar and Grill. Brix barely slowed down as she hooked a right at the first intersection, put the gas pedal to the floorboard again, and kept going.

Jason let out a
whoop
and slammed a fist against the Firebird’s dash. “We did it! We fucking did it!”

Brix grinned and nodded. “Yes. We did. Holy shit.”

Ben groaned and sat up in the back. Brix glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him crane his head from left to right and back again before shifting his attention to her. “You’re heading back into town.”

“I know.”

“Why? Thought you wanted to make for the interstate.”

“I did at first, but I got to thinking.” She glanced at Jason, who looked just as puzzled as Ben. She had a hunch that might change once she told him what she had in mind. Ben wouldn’t get it. He was a part of this zombie-infested alternate world and would only think she was talking nonsense. But Jason might understand. “We’re heading back to the theater.”

Jason looked intrigued, but still puzzled. “We are? Why?”

“It’s the only way. Don’t you see? We can keep trying to survive in this place, where some new menace is always around the corner, just like in a fucking movie, or we can go back to the source of this shit and see if we can figure a way home.”

Ben made a sound of disgust. “Again with this movie crap. You talked this same kind of shit in the bar. What’s wrong with you people?”

Neither Brix nor Jason replied to this right away.

But they exchanged a lingering glance that communicated much as they continued speeding back into the heart of the city.

Jason shrugged. “All right. Okay. Might as well take a shot.”

Ben made that disgusted sound again. “You know what would be great? If one of you assholes would tell me exactly where we’re going. That’s what.”

Another glance in the rearview mirror. “The Sunshine 6 cineplex on Memorial Boulevard.”

Ben snorted. Then he laughed. “What? Come on. You’re pulling my leg, right? That dump has been closed for years. Tell me where we’re really going.”

“The Sunshine 6 cineplex.”

“Well, that’s just about the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard. Why would you do that?”

“It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain.” Brix met his gaze in the rearview. “Look, we’re not kidnapping you or anything. You can have your car back once we get to the theater and then you can go anywhere you want.”

A lengthy silence unfurled after that and lasted until they arrived at an intersection, the green directional signs at the corner marked it as Memorial and Clark.

Ben made a clucking sound as they turned left. “Crazy. Just crazy. So I’m supposed to just abandon y’all to your fate.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Yet another sound of disapproval from Ben. “Crazy. I don’t know what else to say, man. You’re both out of your fucking minds.”

That was a point Brix couldn’t dispute.

What she had in mind was probably doomed to failure.

But she meant to try anyway.

The song playing now was one Greg didn’t recognize. It was some demented-sounding thing about all women being bad, a sentiment he couldn’t really endorse. Except that, given the singer’s delivery of the lyrics, it seemed as if the notion wasn’t being put forth as a negative thing. The singer seemed to relish the notion of a “bad” or dangerous woman.
 

Greg couldn’t help thinking of his own enduring obsession with Lashon, even in the wake of her attack on him. Maybe, much like this apparently deranged singer, he was also drawn to women with a dark or “bad” streak.
 

Ominous appeared to love the song, because he was again bounding about, doing one of his ridiculous, rhythmically challenged dances. Watching him, Greg couldn’t believe someone as goofy as Mr. “I Am Become God” held the fate of the woman he loved in his hands. Or that he was capable of anything at all, other than perennial first-place winner of the official Craziest Person in All Fucking Creation contest. He had to work at keeping one fact front and center, and that was the knowledge that Ominous was putting on a show for him. His loony exterior masked a far darker brand of inner madness.