The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Read online

  Copyright © Adam Cesare, 2016

  Cover by George Cotronis

  Copyediting by J. David Osborne

  Additional editing work by Tod Clark and Scott Cole

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the author.

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  The Con Season

  by Adam Cesare

  “It’s good to see you again, my homicidal friends.”

  -William Castle

  On The Road

  Keith Lumbra squinted against the strobe of the cop light and rolled to a stop.

  Unlike half the stop signs and red lights over the weekend, this time he remembered he was hauling a trailer. He slowed to a stop, administering a slight pressure to the brake to ensure that all his shit didn’t go flying.

  Keith hadn’t been speeding and he wasn’t drunk—merely maintaining a light post-con buzz—so he figured it was his out-of-state plates getting him into trouble.

  That there was no reason didn’t stop his asshole from irising into nonexistence.

  Keith hated cops. Always had and always would. He had no good philosophical reason to dislike them. He wasn’t a minority, and didn’t hold any strong political beliefs outside of his Lloyd Kaufman-inspired pseudo-anarchist leanings.

  He may have had no good ideological reason to dislike cops, but he did have one pretty good anecdotal one:

  Ten years ago, early in his career, Keith had to cross the US-Canadian border to get to his first convention in Toronto. Back in those days, MOD, Manufacture on Demand, hadn’t been a thing. Which meant that it had been an expensive undertaking to order two hundred copies of his first film on DVD. It was so expensive that he’d opted to use a hair dryer to do the shrink wrapping himself, rather than pay the extra fee.

  At the customs inspection booth, when asked if he had anything to declare, he didn’t say “no” like every American except him apparently knew to do. Instead he told the customs official, somewhat haughtily, that: yes, in his trunk he was hauling two hundred copies of his first feature film.

  Apparently, the Canadian government isn’t as liberal as they want people to think. Either that or the officers couldn’t grasp the layers of psychosexual satire at work in the title and back cover description for a movie called Teenage Cumsluts in Tortureland.

  Long story short: Keith Lumbra wasn’t able to sell any DVDs in Toronto. It was cool, though. He may have taken the hit at the convention (where he was still able to sign and distribute postcards), but the coverage of the customs seizure itself had gotten him great press. His best coverage to date, actually, with what seemed like half of the horror community drawing comparisons between the Canadian confiscation of his movie and Ruggero Deodato’s famed court appearance to prove that he hadn’t actually killed his actors while filming Cannibal Holocaust.

  Silver lining aside, at the time not being able to sell his movie had been a nightmare.

  But that was then and this was now. He wouldn’t blow it with these cops. These American cops.

  Using the door’s power controls to angle his side mirror as far away from the car as he could, Keith strained to see the cop car from behind his U-Haul trailer.

  No matter how he craned his neck, he couldn’t make out much in the quickening darkness.

  It didn't seem late enough to be dark, but Keith reminded himself that he was out in the country. Without the benefit of a strip mall on both sides of the road, there was no light pollution to extend the day. Out here in the boonies, the transition from dusk to night happened quickly.

  There was the crunch of boot heels against gravel and Keith still couldn’t see anything, just the blink of the single blue strobe.

  The knock came on the passenger’s side window, not the driver’s side.

  The clatter of the metal flashlight against glass was not inherently terrifying, but it was loud and unexpected.

  It was a well-executed jump-scare that—if it were in a movie—Keith Lumbra would have admired. The noise put the terror into Keith by taking advantage of both surprise and misdirection.

  “Roll your window down, sir.” Keith could make out the cop’s voice, the words slightly muffled by the glass.

  He did as he was told.

  “License and papers, please,” the cop asked, the light of the flashlight still blinding Keith.

  Fucker must love this, Keith thought, his mood stabilizing. He shielded his eyes against the flashlight so he could fish out and then flip open his wallet.

  After a weekend of crawling the convention floor and marinating in the hotel bar of the Indianapolis East Courtyard Marriott, Keith almost handed the cop his business card by virtue of muscle memory. The name's Keith Lumbra, I make fucked-up splatter flicks. He was glad he didn’t regurgitate his rehearsed sales pitch.

  The cop barely glanced at the license before saying: “You’re a long way from New Jersey, Mr. Goldman. Mind if we ask why?”

  Hearing his legal name, not Keith Lumbra but Keith Goldman, always threw Keith off. But it sometimes served as a reminder that he had been doing the right thing when he adopted a pseudonym. The cop’s anti-Semitic emphasis on the ‘O’ in Goldman wasn’t in his imagination.

  Wait, what 'we'? Keith thought, decoding what the cop had said. Mind if we ask... There was more than one cop out there?

  Keith turned to look in the driver’s mirror again and found it blocked by the second cop’s crotch. He'd been flanked without ever hearing the second cop approach. The second man was leaning so close to the car that Keith couldn’t see anything above his elbows. Ninja cop was so tall and so close that he had no face.

  There was a painful bubble of indigestion kicking around in Keith’s gut that hadn’t been there before, less a Flaming Hot Cheeto fart than it was an anxiety pang aided and abetted by Flaming Hot Cheetos.

  Keith spoke as he leaned over in his seat, reaching for the glove compartment to fish out his registration. Or his “papers” like the cop had called them, fascist allusion be damned.

  “Uh, I was attending a trade show. A convention. Over the weekend in Indy,” Keith said. He tried to keep his diction formal and his actual business in Indianapolis oblique. His intestines torsed a second time. Something shifted as he stretched his arm to hand the cop at the window his pink slip.

  There was a long pause as the man crinkled the papers, presumably reading.

  While waiting, Keith looked straight forward. He could feel the cool air from the open window begin to dry the sweat gathering in his eyebrows. In his peripheral vision, Keith noticed something odd. The cop to his left wasn’t wearing uniform pants, but instead what looked from this angle like black denim jeans.

  Keith had owned a pair of black jeans in high school, but even then he’d been a special case. Who wore black denim these days? And how were these cops allowed to do so on duty?

  This thought was interrupted by the cop with the flashlight. “Wait, you don’t mean you were at that horror convention they’ve got up there, do you?” the cop asked. There was a smile in the man’s voice.

  Instantly, Keith felt better.

  No non-fan pr
onounced the word ‘horror’ like this guy just did. Normals, people not into the genre, always over-annunciated the word to make sure it didn’t sound like they were saying “whore.” Either that or they dodged the quandary entirely by referring to horror flicks as “scary movies.” The same phrase a child would use.

  “Yup,” Keith said, and then he pushed in all his chips: “I’m a filmmaker, actually. I was there repping my production company.”

  “Get out of town! My partner was just there, too, weren’t you Benny?” the cop said, still not taking the flashlight from where it rested against the window. At least now Keith’s eyes had begun to adjust.

  Instead of speaking, Benny just gave an “Mmm-hhhmmm” that Keith wouldn’t have been able to hear if the cop in the black jeans had not been standing two inches from the car.

  “Is that what you’ve got back in the hitch?” Window Cop asked.

  “Yes sir, just some props and displays, a few banners.” Keith said, overjoyed that the words “do you know how fast you were going?” or “step out of the car, please” hadn’t yet been spoken, and didn’t seem like they would be. These cops seemed nice, downright chummy.

  “You don’t say?” The cop paused. Now he sounded like the nervous one. “Well. Mr. Goldman, I hate to be bothering you like this, but Benny got to go to the convention and I didn’t. Would you mind showing me what you’ve got back there? Just a quick peek.”

  Uh oh.

  Now Keith was searching for excuses as a nightmare scenario similar to his Canadian adventure began to play itself out in his imagination.

  The cop had an accent, it was that weird bump up against Southern and Midwestern that you found as you traveled with any depth into the eastern half of the country. In movies, at least, that accent almost always accompanied a religious bend, sometimes a fundamentalist furor. Keith thought of that and then considered what he had in the U-Haul. He wasn’t toting around rubber Frankenstein masks and those plastic garbage bag ghosts that you hang on your trees during October. No. He was a modern horror director, someone who made transgressive films.

  There was some real sickness back in the trailer: A girl’s severed head with her nipples stapled over her eyes. A torso that had a series of holes bored into it, the uses for the holes not a mystery if you thought about their circumference for too long. Not to mention a box full of erotic comics that he’d traded a few of his own DVDs for in the vendor's room. The comics weren’t anything that he had creative involvement with, but still: they were pretty extreme.

  The silent cop, Benny, had attended the convention and was probably cool with anything, but how much of a horror fan was his partner? Could he roll hard into the gore shit?

  “I guess I can show you, but I do have to warn you officer that it’s not for the faint of heart. Some of it’s pretty gross.”

  “Oh never mind that,” the cop waved the flashlight. “I can handle it. Seen all those Saw movies. And it won’t take us but a minute and then we’ll have you on your way.”

  Nothing the man had just said put Keith at ease. Those were mainstream movies.

  Keith said okay and then shut off his engine, realizing he needed the key ring to open the hitch. There was that crack of gravel again, in stereo, as both cops walked back to the trailer.

  Without the dashboard lights there was just the single blue police light spinning. It struck Keith as odd that the cops didn’t have their own headlights on. And even odder that they didn’t have a red light to accompany the blue one.

  He double-checked that the car was in park, not wanting to become a YouTube sensation if he left it in neutral and the cops had a dashboard cam. He then hefted himself back out the door, keys in hand.

  It took a moment for Keith’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, he realized the cop car he was looking at wasn’t a cop car at all. It was a beat-up late-90s sedan with a matte black paint job and a single dashboard strobe. The strobe was the kind of light you could buy at a Spencer’s Gifts.

  Keith followed the bigger cop, Benny, to the back of the trailer. He could see that while the man did have the characteristic cop belt/holster combo cinched around his waist, he was wearing black jeans. Up top, Benny was wearing what looked like the kind of plastic bag special button-down shirt that you’d buy at Marshall’s. The shirt was baby blue instead of the NJPD’s darker shade. The man wasn’t wearing a hat and—from where Keith was standing—he couldn’t even be sure if there was a badge anywhere on him. The cop’s shirt didn’t even have those little flaps on the shoulders.

  Shit, Keith thought, realizing something about these two.

  This area must have been so tax-cash poor and backwater that the county’s police department couldn’t afford proper uniforms. That was a sad state of affairs, even to Keith who hated cops. Maybe all those anti-Obama bumper stickers he’d seen out here were onto something.

  They reached the U-Haul door and Benny turned, crossing his arms over his chest and looking bored. There was the glint of gold over his heart, a badge. Behind the beam, Flashlight Cop seemed to be similarly attired, but was himself wearing a pair of dark khakis. Watch out, someone’s dressing for the job they want and is on track to make Captain.

  “It’s some real sick stuff back here. You’re sure you want to see it?” Keith asked one last time, pretty confident he’d made his point by now.

  “I am so sure,” Flashlight Cop said. Beside him Benny stood sentinel, quiet but looming in his clip-on badge and black jeans.

  Keith bent and unlocked the hatch, then lifted it up with solid metal clatter, the chain and pulley making the same sound a roller coaster made as it brought you up for your first drop. But there was also another sound over his shoulder, coming from where Benny was standing. It was a kind of click.

  “Neato,” the cop who’d done all the talking said.

  Keith turned, putting his hand up to shield his eyes as he found the beam of the flashlight back in his face.

  Blinded by the light, Keith Lumbra never saw what cracked him in the face, splitting his nose in two.

  *

  Rory hit the man a second time, with a ferocity that, to his partner, registered as a killing blow.

  “Be careful,” Teeks warned, but not saying anything else as Rory scooped up the film director’s unconscious body and laid him down roughly inside the trailer hitch. If the director slept for any length of time—balled up like that—he would have a hell of a sore neck. But maybe that was the least of his problems, considering the blood pouring from his nose.

  Rory shuttered the trailer, took the keys from out of the lock, and wiped his baton off on his pant leg.

  The bloodstain was invisible against the big man’s black denim jeans.

  Chapter One

  “Silver or black?” Clarissa asked.

  The kid stared back at her like she’d just asked him to find the square root of his parent’s phone number.

  “Should I sign in silver,” she asked again, holding up silver the Sharpie to illustrate her point, “or black?”

  “Whichever you think is best,” the boy said.

  She signed in silver, then paused before going back to fill in the inscription. “Should I make this out to you…”

  God. Damn. It. The kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen, had said his name when he’d first walked up and shook her hand. But Clarissa could no longer remember the name after their silver or black Sharpie impasse had taken up so much brain power. It was the end of the weekend and she was tired, but still, this was frustrating. She always remembered names.

  Of course the boy also had his hands pressed into his front pockets, one elbow obstructing the lanyard that might have sported a name tag, if she was lucky.

  She’d made an oath when she’d first started doing these things: she would remember the fan’s names, for at least as long as they were in front of her table. If she was charging twenty dollars for an autograph (a rate that had since gone up to thirty, in keeping with the market, but she would not lose th
e younger fans by charging forty), it was the least she could do. And, after all, the memorization wouldn’t be difficult: she was a classically trained actor who’d started her career playing first Antigone and then Ophelia. That had been L.A. theater, not Broadway, but the work was still the work. Decades later she could still recall not only her lines, but most of her marks.

  “It’s Mark,” the boy said. Then added with a nervous, between-clenched teeth laugh: “Yes, please personalize it. I’m not going to be putting this up on eBay or anything like that.”

  Maybe Clarissa couldn’t remember their names because they all said the same things.

  When she’d first started doing conventions, she would spend extra time with the young fans like Mark. They were the ones who had their moms and dads waiting for them the next aisle down, so as not to embarrass them in front of the talent. Clarissa used to find that cute.

  But by now she’d heard the old “my older brother told me I had to watch Death Birth” and “I’ve got all your films on DVD. Even the out of print ones” stories enough to know that there was nothing special about younger fans. Particularly now that the internet had made everything she’d ever done readily available, even the movies Clarissa would have preferred to stay hidden.

  “Is that with a ‘C’ or a ‘K’, Mark? I don’t want to mess up a second time.” She reached out like she was going to touch him, even though the span between them was comfortably two of her own arm’s lengths. It was a body language trick she’d picked up, something to put the fans at ease.

  She signed Mark-with-a-C’s name, drew a tiny heart, and then sent him off with a smile and another moist handshake.

  Clarissa would Purell later, but for now she sipped her bottled water and surveyed the line in front of her table. There were about fifteen people waiting, which was not a bad crowd for a Sunday.

  Most of the fans in line now had either purchased a one-day only ticket to the convention (Sunday being the cheapest to attend) or had been saving meeting Clarissa Lee until they were sure there would be money left in their budgets.