The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Read online

  And the laughter ended with the kid, still parked on his ass at Ivan’s feet, his white face pointed now so that Ivan could see that his eyes were red and that the little pussy had been crying.

  Being laughed at was certainly a trigger for Ivan’s indignant rage, the aspect of himself fueled by the volcanic rolling of that deep well of shame he kept covered.

  Ivan curled his hand into a fist, remembered to press his thumbprint flat against the knuckle of his pointer finger, bent slightly at the waist so he had a straight shot, and then let loose, punching the prone kid in the mouth. There was no holding back, not like he’d done with the kick.

  Lashing out wasn’t going to help anything about the situation, but it felt good and it had been a while.

  The nose of the kid’s mask crumpled inward and as Ivan pulled his fist away the plastic stuck to the sweat on his knuckles. The elastic strap stretched and then snapped the mask back onto the kid’s face. The mask dangled, the holes crooked over his eyes.

  It was probably only a second, but it felt longer, until a single trickle of blood leaked out of the rectangular mouth and the kid fell onto his back. Knocked the fuck out.

  There was silence and heavy breathing for a moment. With the slight breeze, it wasn’t as hot as it had been inside the cabin, but still Ivan was sweating.

  The first thrown rock didn’t connect. It didn’t even come close, touching down three feet in front of both of them, leaving a divot in the soft ground and then bouncing to a stop against the dazed kid’s leg.

  Ivan looked up in time to see a second stone coming towards him and he moved so it didn’t strike him.

  The geeks were tossing rocks at him, a herd of water buffalo protecting their own and getting violent even when it didn’t seem to suit their nature.

  Wanting to keep an eye on the real threat, Ivan focused on the top of the stairs. The summer camp psychopath, The Fallen One, was still there. The big man had his arms crossed and had left his chainsaw (and the bifurcated monster movie starlet) abandoned in the room behind him.

  The third rock connected. It had been thrown in such an extreme Hail Mary arc that even while Ivan watched it leave the hand of a beefy camper at the back of the ranks, he hadn’t been able to track its trajectory against the orange afternoon sun.

  The rock was maybe the size of a baseball and it clipped the left corner of Ivan’s forehead and ricocheted off at an angle. Ivan felt the vibration of the hit in his teeth and his vision dimmed, then just as suddenly went bright, like someone putting their hand over a light bulb but quickly retreating from the heat.

  Fine. He was fine. He lifted his hands up to defend himself from any more projectiles.

  “Throw another one, go ’head,” he yelled and found himself stepping towards the group of campers. “Come on, you dickless wonders.” He glanced over to watch Marcus start to run over to his aide but the man was held back by Clarissa Lee. That was smart of her. Any more of them got in one place and that big fucker’s job would have been made far too easy.

  “Let’s go,” she mouthed to Ivan’s bunkmate. Yeah, he couldn’t blame her. This wasn’t going to end well.

  The campers shared some looks between them, wordlessly conferring, and then The Fallen One spoke up.

  “Did you hear what he called you?” he asked, projecting the question over the crowd. The guy was putting on some kind of voice, some mishmash of a British accent, a southern accent, and a speech impediment.

  The campers didn’t seem to mind how ridiculous he sounded, never mind how ridiculous he looked in that outfit. Which didn’t surprise Ivan. Nerds liked their villains heightened. As long as something had the outer veneer of being dark and self-serious, its core could be as silly as it wanted.

  Ivan looked behind him, where he’d assumed would be nothing but empty field and the rest of the camp’s structures. Only now there were a dozen or so campers gathered in the clearing behind him. Either they’d deliberately flanked him or all these new campers had been Johnny-come-latelys.

  “Kill him, friends,” The Fallen One bellowed.

  Ivan put up his fists and they began to close in.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “That was unexpected,” Teeks said, standing over Keith Lumbra’s shoulder.

  Keith didn’t know which action he was supposed to be following on the main screen: there was the fleeing group, headed up by Marcus Lang—not a final girl, but that was fine, Teeks had assured him—or the fans beating Ivan Butinelli to a bloody pulp.

  From the camera atop Deer Cabin, there was a good aerial shot of the circle of bodies that had formed around Butinelli. Making an executive decision, he held on that, making sure to follow the three others with the secondary monitors. Keith had been prepared for the possibility of the guests not sticking together and scattering into the woods. In that case, he would have had to choose a favorite, anticipating the ones Rory seemed most likely to follow and attempt to keep radio contact with their slasher. Now, having only two groups to worry about had actually streamlined things.

  “It’s not how it’s supposed to go! It’s wrong,” Kimberly said from the back of the room. Her voice was stopping just short of a child’s whine.

  Before she’d piped up, Keith had almost forgotten the girl was there. He’d spent so much time in captivity with Rory, and even then there’d been only occasional appearances from Teeks. The introduction of a third person to keep track of and fear meant that he’d refused to believe Kimberly was anything more than a muffled voice on incoming calls. That she would turn out to be the youngest of the four of them had been a surprise, and how young had been an even greater surprise. She looked like a high schooler, a freshman co-ed at a community college at the oldest.

  Over the phone she had seemed to fill the role of the head of consumer relations, interfacing with fans and fielding questions about the event and ticket prices. Teeks had also called her up when he’d needed a general problem solver when it seemed like Rory couldn’t handle a task. Which meant that, once he’d seen and heard her in real life, he hadn’t anticipated there’d be this much whining.

  “It may not be what we planned, baby. But it’s still something,” Teeks said, sounding like he was trying to placate his young ingénue. “It really is something to see.”

  Whether the campers were choosing to fight Ivan Butinelli this way because they were frightened or because it was the way that fights happened in movies, Keith could only guess. If they would all rush the porn star at the same time, the brawl would be over in seconds. But as it was, they’d formed a ring around the man, with only two of the crowd brave enough to step forward and start swinging.

  There were two prone bodies inside the circle now, the original camper that Butinelli had sucker punched and a second, bigger dude who had walked right into the porn star’s elbow upon entering the ring. Bravery was no match for bloodlust with what looked like a little bit of training behind it.

  “Oof,” Teeks said, responding to something onscreen. A chubby guy had knit his fingers together and was slamming both hands into Butinelli’s back. It was a move that Keith had seen on pro wrestling and it probably wasn’t practical in a real fight because the camper jumped back, shaking out both hands, jerking his fingers in pain. Butinelli seemed unharmed by the attack.

  “Can you zoom in?” Teeks leaned in and tapped the screen.

  Instead of losing the panorama of action, Keith obeyed Teeks but kept the movement to a very slight, steady zoom. Too fast and the transitioning footage would be unusable. He eased his finger a millimeter forward on the trackball. He was technically listening to his boss—how he’d come to think of Teeks—but wasn’t going too tight on the action.

  Asking for the zoom was either the manifestation of true producer’s instinct or a lucky guess on Teeks’ part. The tide of the action took a decided turn in favor of the campers and the camera was now close enough to catch all the details:

  One of the brawlers scooped up one of the thrown stones from earlie
r and smashed it across Ivan Butinelli’s face. The shot was tight enough that they caught the shadow of blood leaving Butinelli’s mouth and landing on the dead grass by his feet.

  “It’s not right. They’re all breaking the rules! They’re supposed to be melding into the background. The campers should be an invisible sea of faces,” Kimberly said. She was fully whining now, a panicked tantrum.

  And he thought Teeks had been the control freak. This girl wanted everything scripted, even the uncontrollable actions of the fans.

  You mean their insane, spectator-sport murder game wasn’t unfolding exactly how they’d planned it would? Shocking!

  In his old life, the one in which he’d been spilling fake blood and (mostly) fake puke to make his own movies, Keith had hated people like Kimberly. They were the ones that didn’t see what the big deal was about getting a production to work just the way you wanted it to, the ones that couldn’t grasp that a production schedule needed to be a fluid thing. These kinds of people were poison on set. They were always full of questions (“How is this going to cut together?” and “Why are we doing this?”) and constantly complained when days went overtime or more than two takes were needed.

  He especially hated the women who acted like this. They couldn’t see the art in the struggle and would never get it. But that wasn’t something you could say on the internet without the P.C. Police labeling you a misogynist. Which maybe he was a touch, but still.

  “This footage is great,” Keith said, trying to present a rebuttal to Kimberly, however minor. He didn’t turn back to face her. He tried to say it more to the room in general, if that was possible.

  He regretted the attempt.

  Teeks gripped the back of Keith’s roll chair and swiveled him halfway around so he could still keep a hand on the trackball.

  “Do you have everything all set for a moment so I can tell you something?” Teeks asked, raising his eyebrows like he was talking to a child.

  At his ankle, Keith felt the tug of the bike lock. There was some wiggle room there, if he laid flat on the ground and was able to get his shoe off, it was possible he could work the chain off without having to saw through his foot. But that would require some real mobility, and his sore body wasn’t exactly feeling up to yoga.

  Escape was off the table, probably.

  Keith said that, yes, he had everything set with the feeds for a minute. Teeks’ face was so close to his own that the pulse of the man’s breath was making the open skin of Keith’s nose buzz.

  “She,” Teeks pointed a finger over to Kimberly, “is just as important a contributor to this project as I am. She is merely concerned that the event runs smoothly, which is her job. You, Lumbra, Goldman, whoever you are,” he turned the finger back to Keith and let it hover, millimeters away from the end of his nose, “You are a contractor. You don’t get to editorialize. Is that clear?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry,” Keith said, and he was.

  “That’s good, back to work,” Teeks said, and flicked the end of Keith’s nose. From Keith’s cross-eyed vantage it hadn’t looked like much of a flick, more of a lazy afterthought than a vicious attack, but it hurt so bad he thought he was going to pass out.

  In the corner, somewhere out of sight, Kimberly laughed.

  He hated them all, but somehow, even though she hadn’t been the one beating him and starving him, he hated the bitch the worst.

  “Don’t worry, baby. I’ll call up Rory and get him back on point,” Teeks said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “There’s a gun. Back in my cabin. And I think it’s real, and I think there are bullets for it, too,” Clarissa said and immediately she could see Marcus’s features crush together into an expression of skepticism. They were handsome features, but when they looked like they weren’t taking her seriously she wanted to smack them, to rearrange them on his face.

  “They’ve got to know about it, right?” Marcus asked. “Why would they let you have a gun?”

  “God, we need to go,” Gina Bright said, interrupting. She didn’t add anything to the conversation except a whiff of halitosis. Clarissa could see herself in the woman’s dark sunglasses. She’d looked better, but at least she wasn’t in the middle of a lifelong bender.

  They were all crouched and whispering. Stage whispering, more like it. There weren’t any campers paying attention to them anymore, the attendees all busy as they were converging on Ivan.

  Inside the circle, catching glimpses of him from around the shoulders of campers, the man had both fists raised and was bouncing on the balls of his feet like a boxer.

  Butinelli was nearly as old as she was, but he’d clearly kept in good shape. Under his leathery skin were knots of muscles that had grown prominent now that he was flexing and glistening on this unseasonably warm afternoon.

  “They called it a game,” Clarissa said, trying to remember how she could make her case. “Teeks and Kimberly, they called it that. Maybe it really is one and maybe they’ve set it up so it’s halfway fair. They could be letting us arm ourselves.”

  “Or they want to keep us in this place long enough for that guy to come after us,” Marcus countered, hiking a thumb toward The Fallen One. “It’s not like they have the whole camp fenced in. If we run into the woods, and try to stay headed in the general direction of the road, we can make it out.”

  What made her angriest about the way he was delivering his argument was how much sense it made. Who knew, she could go back to her cabin and find that the gun was gone, a prop that had been struck while they were at the opening ceremonies. Or it could be just that: a prop gun that shoots out a white and red “Bang!” flag when you pulled the trigger.

  Or she could be right. There were ways to make escape difficult, fences and bear traps and who knew if they weren’t being GPS tracked somehow. It was all enough to feed Clarissa’s inner conspiracy theorist until she was overfull.

  She looked back to the cabin. The Fallen One turned his head from the circle of fans beating on Ivan Butinelli back to where their group was crouched. They didn’t have enough cover to be hidden. With the mask and the distance, there was no reading the giant’s expression beyond the coy smile on his lips, but he seemed contented to watch from his perch.

  “But it’s a gun!” she yelled, finally, and clamped onto Gina Bright’s hand. With Marcus’s hand clasped in her other, she towed them behind her, headed off in the direction of her cabin.

  Either she’d won Marcus over with her argumentative skills or he figured any progress was better than watching his bunkmate get torn apart by the most rabid of fanbases.

  *

  “Fallen One? Come in?” Daddy Teeks said into the walkie-talkie. The plastic yellow and black walkies were old technology, the kind of thing that could be purchased at a Toys R Us, but they had a decent enough range to cover the camp and weren’t tied in to a network like a cell phone would be.

  It took a moment for Rory to respond. Kimberly watched on one of the smaller monitors as he retreated out of the doorway to the cabin, out of sight of the campers. This was a technique that they’d established. It was fine if the slasher talked, but he could not be seen answering to some kind of higher power. It would hurt the illusion for their paying customers.

  Not that they weren’t all giving rapt attention to the fight.

  Things had gotten bloody now, even on the small TV she could tell that Butinelli’s scalp was gushing. But things were looking up for the porn star: he’d managed to wrestle the stone away from his most recent attacker and was now crushing the other man’s head with the rock, cracking open the plastic of his mask from nose to nostril.

  It was unfortunate for repeat business, but that guy dying did mean there was one less DVD they would have to burn later and one more prize pack they would be able to relist on the web store.

  “Yeah, I’m here, over,” Rory said through the walkie-talkie. Even with the distortion, it was clear his words lacked Rory’s southern boy casualness and that the voice was The Fal
len One’s self-important growl.

  “They’re headed for the gun. Switch targets, now,” Teeks said, releasing the button on the side of the walkie and tapping Lumbra on the shoulder. “Bring up camera fourteen,” he said to the man seated in front of the control panel, then depressed the button to talk to Rory again. “Take the south path and keep the cabins between you and the woods. They’re running around the long way. And try to let the campers know where you’re going to be. Over.”

  “Roger, Roger,” Rory said, joy in his voice. For that moment he was just Rory, slipping out of character.

  Onscreen, from the shadowed doorway of Deer Cabin, The Fallen One burst over the threshold, waving his hands over his head. He was yelling something to the campers, lost in the audio distortion caused by his flailing arms, but less than half of them turned to listen and even fewer followed him around the side of the cabin.

  With his bulk, it was easy to think that Rory wouldn’t be able to run, but he found the energy somewhere.

  Daddy Teeks returned the radio back to the table, clipping it into its charging deck, and turned back to Kimberly. “You see?” he said. “All fixed.”

  “Not really. He’s still there.” She pointed to the main monitor. Ivan Butinelli was down on one knee now, but still the campers were keeping their distance. Four of their own were on the dirt now, at least one of them fully dead, possibly more, but it was hard to tell from this distance.

  “Just because we can’t hear Rory doesn’t mean that they can’t. He told them to follow him and they will. Either the fight will end or they’ll get bored in a minute or two and move along.”

  “But not before he’s dead and who knows how many of our customers with him. I can fix this,” she said. “Let me go out there and talk to them.”

  “You see what I see, things are about to get much more dangerous out there. You can’t control everything. Who knows? Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Look at the campers and the way they’re participating. Do they look like they’re going to be asking for their money back?”