The First One You Expect Read online

  Praise for Adam Cesare & THE FIRST ONE YOU EXPECT

  “In The First One You Expect, Adam Cesare displays an equal love and knowledge of the horror and noir genres, but what really sets this slim novel apart from other books of its type is Cesare’s unflinching gaze at the life of a person willing to sacrifice everything for a dream. It’s as emotionally devastating as the work of James M. Cain, but with all the violence and sleaze of Tales from the Crypt. I read The First One You Expect in a single sitting, and loved every moment of it.”

  —Cameron Pierce, editor of In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch

  “Cesare’s the young guy with the greatest encyclopedic gorehound know-how, blistering cinematic pace, unquenchable love of both fiction and film, and hell-bent will to entertain.”

  —John Skipp, New York Times bestselling author

  “An engaging, contemporary thriller with a cutting-edge narrative, and characters so real they could live next door.”

  —Rio Youers, author of Westlake Soul

  A Broken River Books original

  Broken River Books

  103 Beal Street

  Norman, OK 73069

  Copyright © 2014 by Adam Cesare

  Cover art and design copyright © 2013 by Matthew Revert

  www.matthewrevert.com

  Interior design by J David Osborne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-940885-05-6

  Printed in the USA.

  BROKEN RIVER BOOKS

  NORMAN, OK

  To any horror fan that picks up this crime book and then recognizes a part of themselves in the characters.

  I hope it’s not one of the awful parts.

  ONE

  Sometimes late at night, I’ll try to think of the exact points that I could change about my life to stop me from getting where I am.

  Not some Doctor Who shit like going back in time to change the future. Just a message I could send to my younger self, just some tiny alteration I could have made in high school, maybe even earlier, that would have gotten me where I want to be.

  Or, at this point, just somewhere else.

  I never dwell on the recent fuckups. I never lay in bed regretting a purchase made on Amazon. I never tell myself that I shouldn’t have pushed her. I go way back, say that I wouldn’t have pushed her if I had asked the right girl to the prom. I wouldn’t have pushed her if I had gone to college out of state. I wouldn’t have pushed her if just one fucking person would have passed my script along to their bosses.

  But, like I said, time travel is science fiction shit. I don’t do science fiction. That stuff’s for fat fags who jerk it to anime girls.

  I’m a horror guy, I make horror movies and that’s one thing I’d never change.

  TWO

  Her tits are like flat tires. She’s a stripper, but third-string and two years out of work. When I first sent her the email (a response to her response to my craigslist post) she sent me back a picture of herself with half a half-liter bottle of Coke. I’m not saying that it was half-full, just that half of it was obscured, in the picture.

  She was my girl.

  Well, one of them, not the first kill and certainly not the Final Girl, but one that could go somewhere in the middle. She wasn’t going on the DVD box, that was for sure.

  It took three messages back and forth to convince her that she would not have to suck any dick onscreen. It wasn’t that she was averse to the idea, just that she was trying to gouge me on her daily rate.

  There’s no hardcore sex in my stuff, just simulated. Like the violence. I read somewhere that filmmaking is artful lying, and I always liked that. As sick as my shit gets, that quote is my true north. As long as it’s all a lie, I’m still an artist and not some loser porn director.

  “No. You sit down, and he comes from behind. You don’t know he’s there. Stop fucking looking,” I yell, cutting the camera. We’re shooting MiniDV, so there’s no real reason for me to cut, but it saves me from watching this useless footage later. I can’t stand to hear my own voice on tape. I sound so whiny when I’m directing.

  “Well I’m sorry, but I can hear him.” She says, moving her hands up and down, her tits not bouncing but swinging like a perpetual motion machine. The way she talks with her hands makes me think that she’s been living in the area her whole life, like me. Only she’s had more time here than I have, she’s over forty, has at least ten years on me. “If I can hear him shuffling around back there, isn’t the audience going to hear him?”

  “No. We’ll fix it in post. Do what I tell you.”

  “We” will be me and I probably won’t “fix it in post” beyond laying some music over it and hoping that the sound of Burt wriggling behind the couch isn’t too bad. The music will be some local garage band grindcore or black metal shit. I don’t much like any of that music, give me The Smiths or even The Misfits. I can’t argue with it though, these bands not only let their music go for free, they also help promote the movie when it’s released.

  Like they think having a thirty second sample of one of their tracks in my movie is going to push them to superstardom.

  Enjoy their music or not, those bands and I are in this together. We’re all a part of the horror community. They sing about nun disfigurement, forced abortion and get some schmuck on Deviantart to do their album covers and they’re automatically in the club. Makes me sick.

  “One more time, then you’re wrapped for today, sweetheart.” I call all the girls sweetheart, it seems like the big time Hollywood thing to do, but using the nickname on this one turns my stomach.

  “Burt, you good?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” I hear from behind the furniture. This couch has been in three of my features and two of my shorts. We need to find a new place to shoot. Either that or Burt needs a new couch.

  I put my eye up to the viewfinder to check that everything’s all good, and it is. The camera’s set up on a tripod so I pop the screen out of it and watch on that instead of having to keep my eye jammed up against it and risk suffering a camera bump if I move my head.

  “Action,” I say. The stripper starts eating popcorn, her fingers are already greasy from the previous two takes, but nobody’s going to notice that. They’ll be too busy leering.

  In the scene she’s watching a scary movie by herself. Topless. As you do, or at least as they do in Tony Anastos films.

  Tony’s my stage name but Anastos is my real name. I figured I’d cut the Greek with a little Italian, even though I’m about as Italian as a gyro filled with souvlaki.

  Burt creeps his hand over the back of the couch, feeling around like his fingers have got a mind of their own. He’s such a ham, even when he spends most of the movie with a sock over his head. Cracks me up, that guy.

  The lady is ooo-ing and ahh-ing at the screen, her face illuminated. Later tonight I’ll shoot some inserts from her perspective, making sure that whatever’s on the TV is out of copyright and in the public domain. Night of the Living Dead, maybe.

  Right now there’s daytime TV on. Ellen explains the douching process to the toad from Dance Moms. Or some shit like that, I can’t tell beca
use it’s on mute. The stripper-broad does a good job reacting to the television it like it’s the scariest shit she’s ever seen.

  Burt’s gloved hand catches her by the shoulder and she turns. His fingers slip down a little bit, like they always seem to “in the heat of the moment.” I tell him that he’s going to get his ass kicked one day by one of these girl’s boyfriends or maybe even the girls themselves. I tell him this, but I don’t much care. In fact, him getting handsy adds realism.

  What evil slasher maniac isn’t going to take a quick squeeze?

  I would.

  He vaults over the back of the couch like he’s a fucking Olympian, but he’s not. The front feet of the couch rise up and smack down and the whole thing shakes, but the actors are both still in frame so it’s all good.

  She slaps at him and I can barely keep from laughing because she’s really giving it to him. The back of her knuckles clip his jaw as she’s winding up for another smack and the sound is priceless. I hope the microphone picks it up.

  He throttles her, taking the knife out of its sheath and holding it up to one of her sagging breasts.

  “I’m gonna make you eat your tits,” he says. It’s an adlib but a good one. We’ll keep it, but we’re not really going to make her eat her tits. Too expensive.

  The thing about Burt’s character, The Debaser, that I think is so great, is that he’s part-slasher and part-serial killer. We don’t have the budget for the big kills like Jason or Freddy, so our slasher’s got a Manson/Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer vibe to him. He talks to his victims, has a process. His kills are all true-to-life. And cheap.

  People on the forums seem to like that. But then again, these are the same guys who pass each other bittorrent links to wartime snuff films and think that animated gifs of the 9/11 attacks set to the Happy Days theme are a riot.

  I don’t know if I’d ever want to hang out with them, but these sick fucks are my audience. Even if they’re misunderstanding what I’m trying to do here, the message under all this corn syrup and simulated semen.

  Burt grips her by the shoulder farthest from the camera and cheats her body towards me as he drags the knife along her neck.

  What a pro.

  The two fingers he’d got curled under the blade pump the Caro syrup down her throat and onto her tits. We hold for a minute and I unhook the base-plate, going handheld for a few shots of her corpse while the blood is still in roughly the same position.

  I try to move quickly because I’ve cut the blood with a little water to thin it, make it pump better. If you leave the watered-down stuff on camera too long it starts getting too opaque.

  Working my way up from the pool that’s formed in her navel, I glide up and hold on her face. It’s like a staring contest, me with my eye pressed up to the viewfinder and her trying her damndest not to blink. When she finally does I cut the camera and stand up.

  Burt’s already got a towel for her. She says thanks and I don’t ruin the moment by telling her that Burt’s more concerned with not staining his couch than he is with her comfort. We’ve got to do something about this fucking couch.

  “That’s a wrap for you, Doll.”

  I don’t tell her about the extra scene we’re going to shoot with the fake head. The latex face doesn’t much resemble her but I’m going to put a wig on it to get the hair color right, at least. Then Burt’s going to pluck her eyeball out, a sheep’s eye that I’ve ordered from a company that sells lab supplies to schools, and then he’s going to mess around with the socket. The extra gore not only gives the sickos something to savor, but pads the runtime.

  Once we hit seventy something minutes this puppy is feature length and we can get to work on the next one.

  I give her the two hundred we agree on and write her name down to be sure it’s spelled the way she wants it in the credits. When Burt leaves the room to go get some wet paper-towels for the upholstery, she offers to blow me for an extra fifty.

  She makes me sad, but that pang of self-loathing doesn’t stop me from taking her up on the offer.

  THREE

  I’ve got a significant following online, but money’s still tight so I work as a cashier down at Stop & Shop. It was a job that was brutally depressing after high school but isn’t that bad now that most of the people I know have either moved away or become equally depressing themselves.

  It makes for good people-watching, and some of my coworkers aren’t total wastes of life. Burt’s not bad, of course. He’s a fun guy, used to be even more fun when he was sober part of the time. He’s a friend and a fan. I pay him a quarter of what the girls get, which usually amounts to half a pizza and a six pack after a day of shooting.

  I don’t drive, so it also helps that Burt has a car.

  My manager is a nice older lady named Deloris. She owns (and claims to love) all of my films. It’s strange for a sixty-something woman to enjoy watching strippers dismembered for seventy five minutes, but it takes all kinds I suppose.

  One time she let me use the deli counter and backroom for a shoot, which is more than my own mother’s ever done for my work. The cold cuts that come out of the slicer still taste a bit like latex. Deloris is all right.

  What I do at the store mainly consists of three things: scanning UPCs, punching in the codes for produce and asking customers if they’ve got a Super Saver card. Even if they don’t have the membership card, I run one for them anyway. This is Deloris’s policy and she claims that it promotes customer loyalty.

  Occasionally I’ll be told to train a new cashier, something that I’m asked to do this morning while I’m clipping my nametag onto my green Stop & Shop polo. The nametag says Tony, even though my paystubs are made out to Nicholas Anastos.

  Over the last few years, I’ve begun to think as Tony Anastos with Nicky fading from my consciousness. Nicholas now seems like a kid I used to know in grade school that moved away. I sign my emails as Tony, take calls as Tony and one day I plan on changing it over legally. It’s like Tony is Nicholas’s cooler older brother.

  “Tony, this is Anna, please show her the ropes.” Deloris says.

  I turn and see Anna. She’s young but not high school-young, which is a relief, because she’s gorgeous.

  “Tony’s been part of the family here for years, but now he’s only part-time because he directs independent films.”

  Deloris is lying, as if even she is ready to admit how pathetic working at this place for fifteen years is. My hours are reduced, but I’m still full-time. It’s the only way to get benefits. She knows that, but she’s just helping me out with this girl.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say, the words coming out meetchew. It’s to the point where I can no longer tell whether I’m trying to put on the Long Island accent or not. I tell myself that I don’t really have one, could stop if I wanted to, but I no longer have to think about using it and that scares me.

  She says the same thing. Then I ask, “Have you worked a register before?”

  “Back in high school, at Rita’s over the summer.”

  That’s nice, she’s pointing out how old she is, wants me to take note that she’s street-legal. A good sign. Her hair is long and black with bleach blonde highlights, so many highlights that it’s hard to tell whether she’s a blonde with black roots or a brunette with blonde tips. There’s a ring of cursive inked on her left wrist, the writing so tiny that I can’t make it out. Either that or it’s Elvish. There are more tattoos under that polo, I know it.

  She’d look good on a DVD case, has a real alt-girl vibe. That’s hot with the nerds. A real life Suicide Girl next door.

  “The custard’s good there, at Rita’s,” I say, even though I’ve only had it a handful of times and it never satisfies me like real ice cream does.

  When Anna isn’t watching, Deloris shoots me a look that tells me she thinks that Anna and I would have cute kids. Deloris is constantly wheedling me about whether I’m seeing anyone. One time she told me a story about her gay nephew and how much she loves him.
I think she made the guy up just to check if I was a homo, because she never mentioned him again.

  Girls are expensive and time-consuming, so I don’t date much. That’s what I tell myself, not Deloris. I’d rather put the money towards my next production, or something else, something tangible.

  I explain the sign-in system to Anna and she stands behind me as I take a few customers. It’s all pretty self-explanatory. It has to be since many of the cashiers are high school kids, most of them stoned out of their minds.

  When there’s a lull I say: “If anyone asks you for something and you don’t know where it is, just send them to an aisle that’s far enough away from your register that they probably won’t come back and ask you again.”

  She laughs at this, but I’m not kidding.

  “What kind of movies do you make?” she asks.

  Oh, that moment.

  I’m not asked often, as I don’t find myself in many situations with unfamiliar people. What I usually say is “scary stuff,” but Anna looks like she can get down, so I’m honest with her.

  “I make microbudget horror films.” I say. There’s a twinkle in her eyes that I can’t tell from the real thing. I’m no good at reading girls.

  “Yeah. Me and my friend Burt have a series of movies starring a character called The Debaser. He works here, too. The tall, goofy guy stocking produce.” I point towards Burt but he’s not there, may as well be imaginary.

  “Just you two?” she asks. “That must be a lot of work.”

  “That or the movies aren’t very good,” I say and she touches my shoulder, like she doesn’t want the self-deprecating act. It’s a bummer, because that’s my only act. “Our movies are really small. We find most of our actors on Craigslist, we don’t pay much.”