The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Read online

  *

  Kimberly the P.A. appeared across the clearing, surrounded by a group of campers who had backed off when they saw the gun.

  She had one of Ivan Butinelli’s thickset arms slung across her shoulders and was crying and screaming hysterically.

  “It was supposed to be a game! Like paintball he’d said!” she screamed, then she seemed to spot Clarissa for the first time. The girl put a hand up. “Don’t sh-sh-shoot!” Kimberly stuttered and bent low in order to make herself a smaller target.

  Without Kimberly’s support, Butinelli slumped to the lawn and groaned.

  It seemed to Clarissa that the girl had enough of show business. That was probably a record for how quickly she’d seen someone disillusioned.

  “I know, I know,” Clarissa said, trying and failing to make her voice sound soothing. “Now, how do we get out of here?

  Epilogue

  Kimberly knew Daddy Teeks was dead the second she saw Lumbra running towards them.

  He didn’t even have to say anything, the gauze on his face was soaked through with too much blood. Blood that was too fresh to have been his own.

  He didn’t have to, but he did say something:

  “He’s dead! Fucking dead and you’re next bitch!”

  Ms. Lee used her fifth and final bullet to shoot Keith Lumbra before Kimberly could even scream for her to do it.

  The heartache of knowing her lover was dead made it even easier to pretend to be shocked and saddened with how Blood Camp Con had turned out. No, acting the part wasn’t much of a stretch at all.

  Lumbra’s quick execution was a silver-lining on an otherwise dark cloud. If he said anything more incriminating, he could have spoiled everything for Kimberly.

  “Rory—the big guy—he’s the one who drove the bus in,” she’d told them once she calmed herself enough and she was sure they trusted her.

  By the time they’d backtracked to the body (Kimberly had to be sure he was dead, too), she was sufficiently composed enough to volunteer to dig through Rory’s pockets looking for the key.

  It was good to have a break from carrying Mr. Butinelli. Both he and Mr. Lang required assistance. Kimberly would be amazed if they were both able to make it to the nearest hospital alive.

  On their way back to where Rory had stashed the bus, Ms. Lee waved the gun at any campers they encountered. She was acting like she still had bullets and they believed her: after all, she was a professional actress. Yesterday, Kimberly didn’t think she could have been any more in awe of this woman, this star, but she’d been wrong.

  They were able to board the bus with no issue, aside from a few campers who wanted a ride. They somehow were convinced that this was still a planned part of the weekend and couldn’t see why a ride back to the airport was an imposition.

  There were no safety belts in the reclaimed school bus, but Clarissa and Kimberly did their best to brace the two injured men against each other in their seats so they didn’t roll off onto the floor.

  Kimberly said she’d watch them if Clarissa felt up to driving.

  As they drove by the sign that assured them that Camp Rockwogh would see them next summer, Kimberly Yost tried to think what her next move would be.

  Two options presented themselves:

  In one she stuck to her story of claiming ignorance as to the true nature of the Con.

  In that future, Michael Teeks and Rory... Rory... whatever his last name had been... they would become household names, and, if anything, she would become just as recognizable as the fourth survivor of the Convention Massacre.

  It was highly unlikely that she would be linked to any of the crimes as an accessory. Her and Daddy Teeks had done their due diligence well in advance. In this future, Kimberly would be the Squeaky Fromme of modern fandom.

  After the initial media coverage died down she could write a tell-all book. She could even do signings at horror conventions, depending on how tasteless her and her representation wanted to go, playing off the deaths of so many.

  That first choice provided a bright future, but it somehow felt like a betrayal of Daddy Teeks and the legacy they’d been trying to build with the con.

  The second option was to scour the internet to find like-minded help building the Second Annual Blood Camp Con. You heard it time and again from organizers, but: the first years of these kinds of events were always filled with growing pains. If anything theirs had been a moderate success.

  Kimberly would be able to perfect the formula on the second attempt, she was sure of it. Money wouldn’t be an issue, since she knew she was provided for. Daddy Teeks had showed her how to access his funds, in case of emergencies.

  It would be easy.

  Now that she looked over at them, she could see that Misters Lang and Butinelli were losing consciousness fast. All she would need to do would be to come up behind Clarissa Lee and slit her throat.

  She’d secreted away Rory’s pocket knife when she’d bent to search his pants and jacket for the bus key.

  It was a harder decision than she thought it would be. Door number one or door number two? Instant fame or honest work? A slasher movie with a soft, PG-13 ending where far too many of the characters lived? Or an appropriately downbeat one?

  Both options were so enticing.

  She would have to make her decision soon, before anyone realized their cell phone was out of range of the jammer.

  She was such a fan of Clarissa Lee. But, then again, she did want to leave her mark on the genre…

  What to choose?

  Acknowledgments

  This book, for better or worse, would not exist if it weren’t for a complicated web of support (both direct and indirect) from a litany of friends, mentors, and collaborators. There are probably too many people I owe big-time for me to list them all, but the major-est of major players are: John Skipp, J. David Osborne, Tod Clark, Jeff Strand, Shane McKenzie, Paul Goblirsch, Stephen Graham Jones, Scott Cole, Cameron Pierce, Matt Serafini, Gabino Iglesias, Adam Howe, Bracken MacLeod, Armand Rosamila and Blu Gilliand. Big thanks to George Cotronis for his beautiful cover (http://www.cotronis.com/). Love to the lovely Jen, for not kicking me out.

  And final thanks to you, dear reader, for making it this far through the book. If you liked The Con Season and wanted to leave a quick review, I’d be even further in your debt.

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  Also Available

  Video Night

  “If you put together the gore, action, monsters, and sense of excitement that made ’80s horror movies so great, you’ll only have about half of what makes Video Night a must-read tome for horror fans.” –Horrortalk

  “The momentum keeps building. The stakes keep escalating. The monsters just keep getting worse and worse, the catastrophic mayhem more juicy and hopeless. Best of all, the writing moves like a greased torpedo, compulsively readable as it rockets through your brain [...] Adam Cesare’s gonna be a Fango superstar.” – Fangoria

  "Video Night is a sharp, smart, energetic novel which pays tribute to all the brilliantly gross horror comedies of the VHS era, even as it carves out its own corners of shock literature." -Daily Grindhouse

  Tribesmen

  “Sick and sardonic and just plain brilliant.” -Duane Swierczynski, author of Fun & Games and Canary

  “The best new writer I’ve read in years. Wonderfully lean prose and edge-of-your-seat thrills. Drop everything else and start reading Tribesmen.” -Nate Kenyon, author of Day One and Sparrow Rock

  “A cunning, cinematic redmeat feast for weird film lovers and horror freaks, Adam Cesare’s Tribesmen is a first-
rate literary midnight movie, and a blistering debut. BRING YOUR FRIENDS!” – John Skipp

  “Tribesmen is a gory and clever homage to those Italian cannibal flicks that we all love so dearly, but without the real-life animal cruelty! Highly recommended.” -Jeff Strand, author of Pressure and Wolf Hunt.

  “Sometimes everything goes wrong, in the best possible way. Think Snuff and Cannibal Holocaust meeting at a midnight movie. And then give one of them a camera, the other a knife.” – Stephen Graham Jones, author of It Came from Del Rio, The Gospel of Z and Demon Theory

  This novella is available in ebook, audiobook, and paperback.

  The Summer Job

  “The prologue of The Summer Job is one the best and scariest openings to a horror novel I’ve ever read. […] The rest of the novel is equally great. It’s a little like Jack Ketchum’s Offseason, if you replace the cannibalistic savages with a satanic cult, but I feel so strongly about The Summer Job that I’ll go out on a limb and say that I believe it’s better than Offseason. I really do.” – LitReactor

  "The textbook definition of a nail-biter. The Summer Job is a kissing cousin to inbred classics from masters like Ketchum and Kilborn. Cesare's best novel yet."—Bloody Disgusting

  "Cesare's latest is a knockout...There's a potent retro vibe running through Cesare's work, in general—he's the closest thing literary horror has to its own Jim Mickle or Ti West."—Complex

  Check out this novel in ebook and paperback.

  Mercy House

  “Adam Cesare’s Mercy House is a rowdy, gory, blood-soaked horror tale guaranteed to keep you up at night. And if that was all it was, I’d have been a happy reader. But Cesare has a maturity far and away beyond his years. His characters are treated with a surprising capacity for understanding and empathy, giving them an unexpected depth rarely seen among the nightmare crowd. Mercy House is the kind of novel you sprint through, eating up the pages as fast as you can turn them, and yet it lingers in the mind like a haunting memory, or the ghost of a smell. Cesare is poised to take the reins of the new generation. Looking for the new face of horror? This is it right here.”—Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Dead Won’t Die and Dead City

  “Mercy House is 100% distilled nightmare juice. Adam Cesare notches up the horror to nigh-unbearable levels. Even my skin was screaming by the end of this book.”—Nick Cutter, author of The Troop

  “Adam Cesare makes his presence felt with Mercy House. A no-holds-barred combo of survival horror and the occult.”—Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  “This is extreme horror at its best, so don’t step into this book with an uneasy stomach. You must wait sixty minutes after eating before opening up Mercy House.”—LitReactor

  This novel is available as an ebook from Random House Hydra.

  Exponential

  "Exponential is fast-paced fun, a rollicking monster movie in 200 quick-moving pages."

  -Ain'tItCool

  "Exponential is an excellent novel, one of the best creature features I've read in years, and will very likely appear on my Top 10 Horror Reads of 2014..."

  -Horror After Dark

  "...Adam Cesare's mix of grim violence and old school horror movie references make for a great read."

  -Rue Morgue (#152) on Exponential

  Pick up this novel in ebook, audiobook or paperback.

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  About the Author

  Adam Cesare is a New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia.

  His work has been featured in numerous magazines and anthologies. His nonfiction has appeared in Paracinema, The LA Review of Books and other venues. He also writes a monthly column about the intersection of horror fiction and film for Cemetery Dance Online.

  His novels and novellas are available in ebook and paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other fine retailers.

  Please visit his website to learn more. Author photo by John Urbancik.