The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Read online

  How many times had Keith himself wanted to do something like this to one of his own actresses? The idea made him both nauseous and excited. How much of what he was feeling was exhaustion, infection, and dehydration and how much of it was a product of his warped mind?

  Reyes screamed again, the sound somehow less intense now that the attack was real, like she was no longer playing it up. Rory dragged her over to the far end of the stage, away from where Teeks had set himself up.

  The big man reared back and slammed Tamara’s head against the folding table, her forehead connecting with the corner.

  The top of her scalp and skull opened up and peeled back. The wound reminded Keith of the way a drunk guy might try to take the cap off a beer bottle without an opener, only to end up shattering the neck against a countertop.

  A new wave of blood pushed across the tabletop, pushing the watery fake stuff out of the way in a darker gush.

  “That’s more like it,” Teeks yelled and raised both his hands. The spectators visible on screen raised their arms in a similar “field goal!” gesture. The crowd went wild.

  Once the show was over, Tamara Reyes’ body slumping against the stage, the blood from her ‘O’ of an open mouth trickling to a drip, Teeks spoke again, his tone very matter of fact.

  “Now let’s eat and you guys can get those pictures taken.”

  *

  Kimberly depressed the shutter but wasn’t happy with the results.

  “Hold like that for a second longer,” she said, showing the palm of her hand to the camper with his arm snaked around Tamara Reyes’ shoulder. The young guy had his mask tipped up atop his head—the mess hall was considered a safe zone so he was allowed to remove it—and she could read the annoyance on his face.

  The autofocus on the digital camera was killing her. She should have taken more time practicing with it.

  She clicked again and the picture showed up on the small screen. It was still out of focus, but close enough to be serviceable. They couldn’t all be perfect. She had a lot of pictures to take. Campers who completed the duration of the game, and paid extra for one of the photo packages, would be going home with a USB flashdrive with all their photos. Their numbers would help to identify them, sending them home with the right pictures even when they had their masks on.

  “Next!” she called for another camper to take his place next to the corpse.

  With no air conditioning in the mess hall and with the hot plates sitting out and open since this morning, the entire room felt and smelled like one big aluminum tray of scrambled eggs. Which was to say: humid and gross.

  And now the room featured one dead body. One Twitter-famous corpse.

  The next camper to take a seat next to Tamara Reyes also put his arm around her shoulder, but Kimberly didn’t like where this kid chose to rest his hand.

  “No, touching, please.” Kimberly said.

  The guy didn’t respond verbally, but he did remove his hand, frowning as he did so. He turned to Tamara and mimed kissing her on her cold cheek, sure to keep a buffer inch between his lips and the dead girl’s gore-streaked cheeks.

  Even with only five seconds to observe him without his mask, Kimberly was able to write him off as one of those guys who was hyperaware of his masculinity. He probably bookmarked quite a few blogs about techniques for picking up women, but didn’t go on many dates.

  Before she clicked the shutter, Kimberly resigned herself to being perfectly okay if this guy’s picture should happen to turn out shitty. Or maybe didn’t make it onto his USB drive at all...

  Kimberly was used to taking pictures on her phone, and was pretty good at it, too. Her iPhone’s camera took higher resolution pics than this outdated Nikon. But, as Daddy Teeks had explained to her, even with network connectivity temporarily blocked, taking photos with a phone was too risky.

  Apple collected so much data and the government just let them. Having a time-stamped, geo-synced, group of post-snuff photos stored in the cloud was too much of a risk. Even for MTY Productions, a company built on risk.

  Planning for the weekend to start off with a scripted—a fake—death ran contrary to what they had conceived Blood Camp Con as being, but Daddy Teeks had made a compelling argument for it.

  “I mean, I’ve never paid for a fight on pay-per-view, I’m simply not that into boxing. But I’m able to understand the disappointment that you’d feel if you paid, what? Sixty bucks for a fight? Only to have it end with a knockout in the second round.

  “If we let the rest of the guests watch Rory make his first kill, his first real kill, they’ll all scatter the second they see that what we’re doing is real. Sure, that’s going to have to happen eventually, they’re going to have to be cued into what’s going on. But if we start it this way then all the campers get to have lunch, get to have some time getting situated, and they’re guaranteed more shocks distributed along an inflated timeline. There’s no reason not to spread things out a bit.

  “It’s value-added. And then the rest of the game can start.

  “We can tell Rory to make it look good, but who knows how long it’s going to take? This is our first time doing it. It could all be over by the end of Friday. There are so many variables and we have a duty to give people a good show.”

  It may not have been every girl’s idea of pillow talk, but that night it’d worked for Kimberly Yost. It felt good, actually, to problem solve and build in contingencies. Sure, they were trying to run Blood Camp Con like a business, but most of the money they were going to get from tickets would have to be put right back into the production.

  Daddy Teeks had money, more money than anyone Kimberly knew, but that wasn’t why she was attracted to him. She wasn’t that kind of girl, a gold digger. Quite the opposite. The only thing that exhilarated Kimberly about her boyfriend’s money was the almost recklessness with which he spent it. And he spent it on cool shit, too, not fancy cars. It was like he didn’t care that he had it and didn’t care if people knew he did, and wasn’t worried if, one day, it had to run out. Money was just…vapor.

  “I could drop dead tomorrow, then what good does it do me?” he would often say.

  Kimberly took another picture, this camper choosing to stand behind Ms. Reyes’ jaggedly lobotomized corpse. The guy looked pale, almost green. Kimberly would have warned him not to throw up on Ms. Reyes if she weren’t so worried about embarrassing him into actually letting go of his lunch.

  You’re going to see worse, she thought. You better keep it together, kid.

  Well, who was she to judge? It may not have been the gore at all that was making him feel peeky. It could have been bad eggs or the heat of the room. But still, there was an intriguing difference between the over-the-top sadism of something like the Guinea Pig films and seeing the real thing. No matter what a coked up Charlie Sheen will tell you.

  She took the nauseous kid’s picture and waved him away so he didn’t vomit on the merchandise.

  The change in the room happened so suddenly it took Kimberly a moment to notice. The mess hall’s soundtrack of excited chatter and the scrape of plastic utensils on paper plates ended. The ambient noise was replaced with nervous, giddy, whispers.

  “So damn cool,” said the next camper in line to have her picture taken, sitting down next to the corpse.

  The camper was a young girl whose uniform was slightly off-book. Her plain black T-shirt was a babydoll cut instead of the men’s Fruit of the Loom stipulated by the rules. They’d put this rule in bold, under a header called “For Female Campers”, but Kimberly doubted that infraction was going to be held against the girl. She remembered signing the female camper in without commenting on it. Sisters had to stick together, was the way Kimberly saw it. Some of the time.

  Kimberly looked up from behind the Nikon’s viewfinder to see that The Fallen One was now stalking through the mess hall.

  “Someone must pay!” Rory yelled, not sounding like himself.

  *

  The bodycam had been Keith
Lumbra’s suggestion, an attempt to keep himself useful once they’d arrived at the campgrounds and had begun the laborious processes of camera installation and set dressing. What camera angle was more slasher than a first-person POV?

  His original idea had been to stitch a GoPro into The Fallen One’s costume somewhere, but there was no way to configure those small cameras to broadcast their high def signal live into the studio.

  Even as it was, the battery life on the bodycam (the same one that some police departments used) when it was broadcasting was prohibitive enough that Keith made sure not to radio Rory to turn it on until after the opening ceremonies. Keith had plenty of coverage out there, and The Fallen One’s POV would be best utilized while he was out and about, stalking his prey.

  The camera had been placed under the lapel of Rory’s leather jacket, the lens not hidden in any way, but at least camouflaged by being placed in a sea of metal studs. They’d tried it in different locations but the camera needed to be high up and as near as it could get to Rory’s center mass to stop him from inadvertently eclipsing the shot by swinging his arms as he walked.

  Keith watched the monitor as The Fallen One crossed the length of the mess hall, campers leaning away from him and scooting down on their benches as he approached. The view inspired the kind of motion sickness Lumbra experienced while drinking and trying to play video games at the same time.

  Not only the vertigo, but the footage also created that weird sense of dislocation that only movies can. Objectively, Keith knew that he was only separated from the on-screen action by a single wall, but the fact that he was watching it on a TV meant that it felt like it had happened hundreds of miles away and years ago. About thirty years ago, if this was an honest to God slasher they were making.

  The feed from the bodycam was coming in at a much lower bitrate than the wired input from the surveillance cameras, but the video quality wouldn’t be as much of an issue as the sound. The microphone built into the bodycam scraped and popped with distortion every time Rory moved. Which meant that none of his dialogue would be unusable if he spoke it while walking.

  “Someone must pay!” Rory yelled, clearly conscious of their sound restraints because he shouted it only after reaching the center of the room and coming to a full stop. It was silent around Rory, with a single awkward laugh from a camper who either couldn’t cope with the fear or was genuinely unimpressed by how The Fallen One’s voice sounded.

  Keith had known that letting the slasher—their slasher—speak had been a bad idea. What movie did that? But Rory had insisted that he have “lines” when Teeks had pressed the issue. Keith wasn’t going to weigh in as anti-talking slasher, of course.

  “You,” Rory said, pointing out with his left hand, the wide angle of the lens making the shot distort, giving Rory’s arm a funhouse mirror’s stoutness. The microphone then rippled, fabric rubbing against plastic, and the monitor went dark as Rory crossed his right arm over the lens. He was searching for something in his jacket and brought the hand back out with a small wooden carpenter’s hammer, blunt on both sides.

  With the body camera tilted slightly up, now that Rory was standing tall and pumping out his chest, Keith cycled through the two cameras in the mess hall to search for a better angle.

  Rory had been singling out the camper with the oversized backpack and by the time Keith had been able to dial in the correct camera numbers, Rory had the kid’s head locked under one of his big arms.

  You did this, Keith thought to himself, remembering how he had written down the kid’s number on the infraction sheet. But no, hadn’t Teeks been standing right behind him anyway? The backpacker did it to himself.

  “Please, I didn’t do anything,” the camper protested, but Rory ignored him, setting down the hammer on the lunch table to free up a hand. The camper hadn’t been eating alone but the table was clear now. Most of his “new friends from camp” had left their trays.

  The Fallen One undid the drawstrings on the camper’s backpack with one hand and tipped the contents onto the mess hall floor. Keith spotted a can of Sterno, a change of clothes, bug spray, and a small tackle box. It was the kind of stuff you actually took camping. All of the items spilled out and scattered until the bag was empty. Or as empty as Rory could make it with one hand while keeping its owner in a headlock.

  “Do. Not,” Rory bellowed. He was sounding appropriately menacing, must have been getting the hang of his character’s voice the more he used it.

  Rory dropped the end of the bag and retrieved his hammer. Then he smacked the camper across the bridge of the nose with the blunt instrument and that ended his screaming.

  Keith gave an involuntary hiss and his own busted nose stung in response and/or sympathy for that of the backpacker’s.

  “Do. Not. Talk.” Rory let the guy’s neck go and braced his arm between the table and bench. By aiming at the space where the kid’s arm wasn’t resting against the table, he was able to break the camper’s wrist with another smack of the hammer.

  “In.”

  He delivered another blow to the head as the camper tried to wave his unbroken arm out of range and the kid slumped to lay flat on the floor.

  “No Talking Zones.”

  The Fallen One stamped down with a boot and whatever he’d done to the guy’s legs and pelvis was hidden to all three cameras, but not the microphone. It was the sound of a head of cabbage placed under the back wheel of a golf cart. Don’t ask how Keith knew that sound.

  Teeks wanted the finished highlight reel to have a very naturalistic feel, but that didn’t mean that turning up the broken bone sound in post would be lying. Keith made a note to do that later on, in editing.

  After Rory had administered a couple more whacks, for which Lumbra switched to the bodycam on the main monitor, Rory dropped his hammer and started stuffing the camper into his own backpack.

  He folded his extremities along their new joints and, surprisingly: it worked. The guy fit inside the pack.

  No one cheered, and from what Keith could see, no one continued eating.

  When Rory was finished wedging the camper into his own luggage, he took a seat at the empty table and waited there for a beat, breathing heavily.

  Sitting and resting was an odd performance choice, but Keith had to respect it. And then he realized that he was being silly: Rory was a real dude, not an otherworldly embodiment of evil. He got tired and needed to rest, just like anyone else.

  In the control room, Keith was hot and out of breath and all he was doing was sitting down. Assuming the heat wasn’t a fever from his various infections, he could only imagine how sweaty Rory was getting inside his mask and jacket. They should have made the costume out of lighter weight material, but who knew it was going to be this warm in October?

  Without a word, Rory stood and left the room through the double doors that led out to the rest of camp.

  After thirty seconds or so of silence, the first of the campers pushed their masks back down over their faces and followed after him.

  Lunchtime was over.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Do you think she got paid the same amount as us?” Butinelli asked. “That’s a bit part. Doesn’t seem fair, if she’s getting to go home after one night.”

  “No, you’re right. It doesn’t,” Marcus said, not really agreeing, internally, but not wanting to encourage the continuation of a conversational loop they’d been stuck in for nearly an hour.

  “So we keep waiting now? How do you think this works?” Clarissa Lee asked, standing from the edge of the bunk she’d been lying down on and joining the rest of them in the center of the room.

  As much as Marcus tried to stay abreast of genre news so he could put on a good show for fans, horror movies weren’t really his thing. But he did have to admit that there was so much junk that it made the quality material stand out, made it more easy to spot in a sea of dreck.

  Not even a true horror fan, Marcus was nevertheless star-struck by meeting Clarissa Lee. How old
was she? She couldn’t be sixty yet, could she? Whatever her age, and he was aware of the cliché, that her age was merely a number. She looked good. Maybe not the teenager who’d made her name carrying Cthulhu’s child. Or the twenty-something who had become her director/husband’s muse-of-diminishing-returns in the late eighties. But Clarissa Lee was still a movie star, one whose beauty had entered a more earthy period. There was less gloss, less try-hard effort, to her body and face.

  Marcus liked it.

  When they were all done fiddling with their dead phones and having polite conversations about what the rest of their schedules for the year looked like, they came together in the center of the room to discuss what happened next. If not direct instruction from Teeks or Kimberly, at least an appearance from the camp’s “slasher”—that big bastard—would let them know they were at least waiting in the right place.

  They were currently standing in the girl’s side of the cabin. The ladies had six bunks to Marcus and Butinelli’s four, so their cordoned off section of the building offered a bit more room for air circulation. They kept the front door propped open, but still Marcus was looking forward to sunset in a few hours to cut the heat.

  “Something better happen soon. It’s too hot and it’s getting dark,” Gina said, peering out the nearest window between two bunks.

  She was right about one thing: they’d been in the room almost an hour, waiting for some kind of indication of what to do next.

  But it wasn’t currently “getting dark” as she’d said. It was fall and the sun would be setting earlier in the day, but Gina Bright was wearing sunglasses inside. Nobody corrected her.

  “Well, I’m not running anywhere,” Margery Clampton said. As dismissive as the statement was, it was surprisingly cogent. Marcus took it as the first evidence they’d been given that the old woman was at all aware what was going on around her.