The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Page 12

  “Tammy clearly knew that her death scene was coming,” Marcus said. “She had to go away with Teeks and get prepped with rigging, cues, and makeup. I know that I haven’t had that kind of briefing. And I get the feeling that we’re all currently waiting on whoever’s supposed to die next.”

  Clarissa nodded at this. “So who is it? Let us know where we’ve got to be and when so the rest of us can relax.”

  Marcus looked to the faces around him. Margery shook her head, Ivan leaned his head against the closest top bunk and said “I wish I knew,” and Gina was still watching out the window.

  “Ms. Bright?” Marcus asked. She didn’t answer him. “Gina?”

  She turned to face the rest of them, realizing that she was being spoken to. “Oh, shit no. I’m not getting messy today, maybe Sunday morning,” she said, then hooked a finger to the window. “There are, um, well there may be something happening now, though,” she said, slurring only a little.

  Marcus spotted the top of a camper’s head approaching the open door to the cabin. The kid took a timid step up onto the porch so he could peer over the threshold and into the cabin.

  Around them, the room seemed to darken slightly, either a shift in cloud cover or...

  Faces pressed against the room’s four windows, campers going to tippy-toes and pressing their masks to the sills in order to watch inside the room.

  Marcus, a man who’d been on sets where there were upwards of thirty people behind the camera, had never felt more on stage. No, not on stage, because he wasn’t performing. This instead must be what a wild animal feels in a zoo. He and his fellow guests were in a fish bowl.

  “I guess lunch is over,” Butinelli said. It was strange that he really talked like that, in semi-one liners. What unseen camera crew and director was the Russian playing to? Or was he a method actor? Either way, it was surprising that he didn’t have a bigger career. Or a bigger career where he got to keep his pants on.

  Clarissa shushed him.

  “Listen,” she said.

  They all did. Even Gina got her drunken labored breath under control long enough for Marcus to hear what Clarissa had been pointing out.

  “An engine?” he asked.

  The sound was getting closer, coming around the back of the building, through the side of the partition that led to the boy’s quarter of the cabin.

  “Are there motor boats on the lake?” Butinelli asked.

  “No. I didn’t see any. And how can you not recognize that sound,” Clarissa said. Marcus had trouble placing it until she chastised the other man for it.

  “That’s a chainsaw,” Marcus said, suddenly feeling more alert in the hazy afternoon.

  Clarissa gave him a look and a condescending half-smile that said: You get an ‘A’ for the day!

  Even when she was tossing sarcasm at him, he chose to see the playfulness in it: choosing to imagine the possibility of maybe hanging out sometime later this weekend. A private hang out session.

  The sound of the idling chainsaw came closer, stopped, and then filled the room as the door on the other side of the partition was swinging open.

  “So we run?” Marcus asked while looking around, still unsure how this game they were in was supposed to be played. He wondered which of them was supposed to be the next to go, whether anyone knew but wasn’t saying. The actors had no reason to lie to each other. But they could be lying, and if Marcus was going to put money on which of the other actors had a secret meeting with Teeks to plan their death, his bet would be either Gina or Ivan.

  But he’d been the one on his phone before the ceremonies, sequestered in the cabin and trying to negotiate his deal with Graveside Productions. It was very possible that Marcus himself was everyone else’s chief suspect.

  There was the creaking of floorboards as the chug of the motor came closer to the partition. The wall was a simple canvas tarp that had been staple-gunned to the floor and ceiling to divide the rooms.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Marcus said again, the other actors simply standing and watching the not-a-wall. He couldn’t tell if his nerves were the feeling that a loud rolling noise provoked, or whether he was just anxious to perform without a script or clear direction.

  Outside the open door, he could see that there was a bigger crowd of masks jockeying for position. Marcus wondered, if he did flee, if the bystanders would be quick to move out of the way if he or his fellow actors would need to push through. It would be against the rules for them to interfere, wouldn’t it?

  “Yeah, let’s do it. The beach is probably still nice,” Clarissa said. She was trying to sound calm, but it was clear that not even the most experienced horror actor among them was immune to the chainsaw jitters.

  Marcus had seen this phenomenon before. It had been on one of the two occasions he’d been a guest at the opening of a haunted attraction. Presiding over one was kind of their cottage industry’s equivalent of cutting the ribbon at a supermarket opening.

  Even though attendees at these things knew the chainsaws were fake—or had at least been made safe by removing the chain and getting a soft rubber bumper placed over the blade—there was something about the rumble that made the caveman part of one’s brain reject rational thought. That was why every haunted house worth their salt had at least one guy with a chainless chainsaw stalking the grounds. The tools were great for crowd control and mood setting. There was something visceral about that sound, the way the vibration stuck in your chest.

  They listened as the chug of the idling chainsaw reached the middle of the room, as close as it could get to the partition, and then revved, causing all of them to move for the door at once.

  All of them except Margery Clampton. The old woman had flinched like the rest of them, but kept both feet planted to the floor, watching the partition. Ms. Clampton was doubling-down on her vow that she would not be running anywhere.

  The rest of the guests took a step and stopped as one. Marcus looked back and watched as the familiar, phallic, end of the chainsaw appear in the canvas. The blade split a slash into the partition. Chunks of fabric and a cloud of dust spewed out from the whirring chain. The chain that was still attached to the end of the chainsaw even though there were actors in this room. The insurance liability would’ve been enough to make Marcus’s head spin if he weren’t so intent on watching where that chain was headed.

  Almost instantly, the hole in the divider became a chimney, filling the ladies’ side of the cabin with gasoline exhaust. Apparently, with all that standing he did on the other side of the room, The Fallen One had hotboxed his portion of the cabin.

  “It’s a real fucking chainsaw,” Butinelli said, the first of them to be able to speak and resume his progress out the door.

  Everyone moved back except Margery Clampton, who crossed her arms in defiance to both the noise and smell.

  The teeth of the chainsaw continued whirring. On the other end of the divider, The Fallen One pushed the end of the blade so far down to the bottom of the canvas that it nicked the floorboards and sputtered sawdust into the air.

  The opening into the other room was now wide enough that the biker-cum-slasher was visible beyond the old woman, his bulk outlining her lighter dress with his black leather and chrome.

  “Come on,” Marcus said to Margery, not sure if he was being stupid and asking a trained actress to abandon her pre-assigned cue. Had she been playing all of them? By refusing to leave this mark was she just performing her part, as scripted?

  With one bone-spurred forearm, The Fallen One spread the curtain wider and stepped into the room.

  “I’m done with this shit,” Margery said to him, craning her head to look the tall man in the face. His eyes were ringed with black grease-paint to make it harder to tell where the man’s flesh began and his mask ended. He let the chainsaw idle and stood stock still, pressing out his chest as if he were allowing Margery to sniff an invisible flower on his lapel.

  “It didn’t used to be this way,” Margery continued, her th
oughts seeming rushed but her voice articulate and sharp. “Men were men and women were dames and the movies meant something. And the movies that didn’t mean something were disposable garbage for kids and we all acknowledged that. We knew what junk was! It wasn’t meant to last!”

  The Fallen One gave her a slight nod—respect? Grudging acknowledgment?—and then lowered the chainsaw into her collarbone. The weapon was very real.

  There was no way to fake what came next.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Women and children first was so last century.

  At least this was what Ivan Butinelli thought to himself as he was first out the door. He hadn’t pushed anyone out of his way or trampled on any pregnant ladies or anything, but he hadn’t encouraged any of the three women to get out of the cabin ahead of him.

  There was no way he was standing around and huffing gasoline fumes while some redneck swung heavy machinery around inside of a tight space.

  His right to escape without fear of offending other ages or genders was what equality was all about, right?

  He looked back, watching through the doorframe like he was one of the spectators, one of those dopey kids in white masks.

  As for the old lady…

  From where he was standing, on the patch of dead grass a few feet out from the cabin’s stoop, he couldn’t see much.

  But what he could see from his vantage didn’t seem like a special effect.

  Or, maybe it did seem like a special effect but not one that could be achieved in-camera, with puppetry and silicone. There would definitely need to be some CGI and green screen involved.

  Shit, most of the fuck scenes he performed on a daily basis required more movie magic, cutting the camera, pausing a contiguous sequence to drink lots of fluids to wash down his pills. Recently there had even been one or two stunt cocks spliced in from the production company’s vast library. He wasn’t proud.

  No, the old lady split in two, no VFX team needed. She was a grouchy old amoeba that had finally had enough and was divorcing its top from its bottom half. The split happened diagonally, from her right shoulder down to her left hip.

  For a moment the two slices of her wobbled in the air against the tug of the chain and then slowly began to split in opposite directions. Her head fell back towards the open door while her right shoulder and arm fell down and forward, towards her attacker.

  The two younger women—younger but not young, he’d realized that fact upon seeing Gina Bright again, a few months after their ill-advised hook up—spilled out of the room next and obscured his view for a moment, followed shortly by the black guy, Marcus. Only he wasn’t so black anymore, and not nearly as collected as he’d been when he was lecturing them all in the cabin.

  Marcus Lang was covered in blood, the front of his shirt no longer white, but pink where it hung loose and dark red where it was saturated enough to suck against his skin.

  And Ivan thought he’d gotten it bad with the fake blood. That had been nothing, and at least he’d been able to change out of his ruined silk shirt. It was too hot for the long sleeves anyway.

  What was he thinking? Was he entering some kind of shock? This was an emergency…

  “It’s real!” Marcus yelled, echoing Ivan’s thoughts. “Someone get help!”

  None of the bystanders looked like they were running to get help. They just pushed in towards the action and craned their necks to get a better look, careful not to bump into Ivan or the rest of the guests.

  Marcus Lang put an arm on each of the women and pushed them away from the door, the same way you would clear the area of a burning building if you were worried the windows were going to explode outwards, showering everyone in glass.

  Ivan didn’t follow after them. Instead he stayed to watch the old woman and the big guy. The chainsaw had reached her hip and stopped, the blade getting caught against the bone and grinding to a halt.

  She was old, it was completely possible that she’d undergone hip replacement surgery. They made those things out of titanium. Ivan knew this stuff because he’d needed to visit a specialist himself, after his weekly visits to the chiropractor had stopped helping. Having his back cracked had actually started making his post-work aches and pains hurt worse, his bones letting out louder pops every time. But there was nothing, or nothing his insurance would cover, that the specialist could do for him.

  As if to confirm this bionic-hip theory, the chainsaw whirled briefly and stopped again, gears grinding and plumes of black smoke making it harder to see into the room.

  Letting the chain idle instead of doing any further damage to the tool, the big guy, The Fallen One, howled out an expression of frustration against the fact that his weapon was now fused into the old bat’s pelvis.

  Even in death, Margery Clampton was making life more miserable for those around her.

  The big man took a few steps toward the fresh air and the observers who’d pressed in for a better look gave him a few feet wider berth. The Fallen One kept a hold on the chainsaw’s crossbar with one hand and dragged the two halves of Margery Clampton’s corpse behind him. She left two distinct blood trails across the floorboards.

  “Whoa, awesome,” someone next to Ivan said under their breath. It was one of the “campers,” and the kid took a step toward the door where his buddies were beginning to form a barrier.

  Ghouls, all of them.

  Indignance wasn’t something Ivan Butinelli allowed himself to engage in often. He’d seen enough holier-than-thou finger wagging leveled at people in the porn industry. He didn’t judge often because he didn’t like being judged. And, if he was being honest, he had a fairly deep reservoir of shame as it was.

  Ivan was a guy in porn, and an old school one at that. If he were a female performer he could have been one of those alt-girls who wrote, directed and produced their own scenes. Those girls tried to put the onus and agency onto themselves, and were applauded for it. If Ivan were a younger man, he could at least be an “ally”.

  But he was older and old school. When he started in the biz he was dumb and coked-up enough that he hadn’t even realized he was supposed to adopt a cute stage name, he’d simply shifted his middle name (inexplicably Italian) over to make a new last name.

  His reluctance towards flying into an indignant rage wasn’t because he couldn’t. No, he was very good at indignant raging, but that temper was part of what had gotten him exiled from “legitimate” film work, so he’d been making a conscious effort to curb it in recent years.

  But hearing the geek in the mask marvel at a little old lady being chainsawed in half made him angry. It made Ivan Butinelli righteously angry.

  “You think that’s cool?” Ivan said, coming up behind the kid. He put two hands flat on the attendee’s bony shoulders and pushed. For someone who was in the same size and weight class as Ivan, the shove would have simply staggered them, but it sent this scrawny kid to the ground.

  In the air, the spaz was barely able to get an arm out in front of himself. He skidded one elbow against the gravel and dry grass and Ivan could see that the skin there was already all torn up and gritty.

  “Mother fucker,” Ivan said and used one toe to tap the kid in the gut. It was not a real break-your-ribs kick: just a tap, really.

  “Ivan, leave it, we’ve got to go!” Marcus shouted to him. Ivan glanced up to see that Marcus and the others were at the edge of the woods, the three other pseudo-celebrities were far away from the action, huddled together in the brush but still visible.

  Ivan ignored him.

  The kid on the ground was holding his stomach with one hand and picking dirt out of the abrasion on his elbow with the other. It was hard to tell with the mask, but it sounded like he was crying.

  “You like seeing people hurt but you can’t take being pushed? Fucking pathetic fucking loser. Impotent nerd.” Even though he was the one who said it, the word ‘impotent’ still caused Ivan to get an involuntary shiver at the base of his neck.

  No, never impotent. I
’m good to go whenever and wherever, just get those lights set up.

  Instead of making real contact with the kid, he kicked again and stopped short. His shoe scuffed a cloud of dust and sand into the wound that the kid was trying to clean.

  Made you flinch. He’d never been one of those guys growing up. He’d been self-conscious about his accent, but, even still he’d been big enough to be invited to hang out with those guys. No, he’d hadn’t taken them up on that, had never become a bully, but, then again, he’d never been on the receiving end of a push into a locker. So how could he empathize?

  “Stop it,” someone said. Ivan looked up in time to see a camper covering her own mouth, like she’d caught herself talking when she wasn’t supposed to be. They took the rules seriously around here, even when one of them was being assaulted.

  The female camper was a tad overweight, but these days who wasn’t? She was a shapely girl. What was she doing out in the woods blending into this malnourished sea of paleness and bad skin? That’s what he would have asked her, had he not realized that every single white mask in camp was now turned towards him. There was no expression on their plastic faces, but he could sense the anger rolling off of their postures.

  Him beating up one of their own had become the main event and even The Fallen One had leaned against the cabin’s doorframe, watching Ivan with crossed arms.

  “This is insane. Somebody call the cops!” Ivan said, then pointed to the goon in the leather jacket and the heavy duty mask. “That guy should be in fucking prison.”

  He didn’t know where he was going with this line of reasoning, because clearly something was not right and no cops were forthcoming.

  Then the laughter began.

  The sound seemed to roll forward, starting at the furthest row of campers, the ones still arrayed around the cabin’s windows, and not petering out until it reached the front half-circle where the lone fangirl was standing.