The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Read online

  She was just a wittle giwl from the stwicks, what would she know about the industry?

  Instead of going back inside to put pants on, he just walked out into the night, closing the door behind him. Maybe Toby Givens had the capacity to annoy, but he was willing to work for his client, any time of night.

  “He’s just a short walk away. Our team’s working through the night to put the finishing touches on one of the attendee cabins.” Kimberly held her hand out to guide him, a right this way motion.

  Where Toby Givens produced the phone from, she didn’t want to know (the sweatband of his boxers?), but the moment they hit the footpath leading to the center of camp, the older man had his Blackberry out and switched onto flashlight mode.

  That could be a problem. Not a huge one, but a problem.

  As they walked, Kimberly looked up. The night sky was full of stars. It was the reason everyone gave for liking the country, going out into the woods to avoid the light pollution, but that didn’t make it any less true, or the light-show of a clear night any less awe-inspiring.

  Kimberly glanced back and Toby was staring into his phone, scrolling through messages while the flashlight was still on. Kill your battery much, guy?

  Hmmm. Kill. Ki Ki Ki Ma Ma Ma.

  She smiled to herself and cleared her throat in order to make sure Toby knew to follow her down the right fork in the path, towards the darker part of the camp.

  Kimberly had chosen to meet at Cabin Three because it was the furthest from the rest of the guests. The rest of them had only just arrived a couple of hours ago, then been shown to the guest cabin (Deer, er, One). It was likely that one or more of them weren’t yet asleep, especially if any of them were keeping California time. She hadn’t yet had the opportunity to meet any of them or to debrief with Daddy Teeks. There was so much to get done before tomorrow.

  Well, Cabin Three was secluded and Kimberly had a pretty good memory of where that camera had been set up: it had two large trees framing the shot, and the cracked-white paint of the cabin would provide a silhouetting effect.

  “Here we are. He should be inside,” she said.

  Toby looked up from his phone and then looked to Kimberly. He had an expression on his face that was polite but still incredulous.

  Yes, she was acting suspicious. And no, the lights weren’t on inside Cabin Three, the Eagle, they could both see that.

  “Doesn’t look like he is in there,” Toby said, peering into the dark cabin. “Why don’t you call him?”

  It was a pity. Cabin One—the one with the carved Deer placard—would have been more appropriate. Toby was doe-eyed, confused but also confused about why he should be confused. And was that a little bit of fear she saw in his expression?

  “Just do it already,” Kimberly said, finally dropping her voice to her normal register, not the character of the “production assistant” that she’d been wearing for the last six or so hours. How these actors did this all day was beyond her. It was exhausting.

  Toby scrunched up his face, as if to ask “just do what already?” but she hadn’t been talking to him.

  Rory tossed the loop of—what was that? Rope? Some kind of cabling?—around Toby’s neck and the smaller man was lifted off the ground. His Blackberry slipped from his fingers and fell end over end, landing with the LED flashlight shooting up into the sky. The tiny but powerful light threw strong shadows onto the faces of the manager and his attacker.

  Rory strained and lifted higher, groaning. The big man laughed through the exertion. His elbows dug into Toby Givens’ spine and forced the manager’s chest forward into a position that would have been uncomfortable for a man of any age.

  Toby was incredibly quiet. There was no way for him to scream with all his weight being leveraged against his windpipe.

  Kimberly wouldn’t go so far to say that she was disappointed, but she would agree that the kill was remarkably uncinematic.

  Toby just hung there, his arms and legs not only not thrashing, but barely moving at all. The weight and the sudden jerk of the garrote had been too much, maybe. The cable had worked a sharp divot into the man’s throat, sealing up not only air but blood flow.

  Kimberly took a step back to ensure that she wouldn’t be in the hidden camera’s shot. She tried to think of a single choking scene in all of cinema that had been this quiet.

  Rory’s pillowcase mask looked ridiculous, but maybe in the black and white of the surveillance footage the floral pattern wouldn’t read quite as…flowery. That was fine, though. All of cinema’s killers underwent some kind of transformation process. This version of Rory was larval. They would make him better.

  *

  Keith Lumbra kept his hand on top of the tower of hard drives and watched the murder unfold on the monitor.

  He could feel the spin of the drive through his palm, feel the warmth traveling up from the rest of the equipment as the machine kept up. The warmth helped take his mind off the pain on the back of his hand. The pain was all over his body, in fact, starting at his nose and echoing outward to his extremities.

  The stack of hard drives was converting raw data into memory, taking in every detail from the three camera feeds Keith currently had set to record. The hard drive was taking down more information than anyone would ever need, but that was the point. Keith had been instructed not to miss anything, and he wasn’t going to. Teeks wanted coverage and he would get it.

  One camera rolled on an inferior set-up where only a sliver of Rory’s back and shoulder could be seen, but it would still come in handy if either party moved.

  Camera Fourteen, the establishing shot, was still being recorded in case Rory carried the body away with him when he was done, crossing through the center of camp. He wouldn’t, Keith guessed. It would be better to dump the poor bastard in the woods.

  And then there was the main event.

  Camera Twelve was pointed to catch the rear of Condor Cabin, with a few extra degrees of forest to either side. Each camera had zoom functionality, but rather than risk Rory or his prey dipping out of the frame, Keith was keeping a fairly wide angle. He kept Kimberly, who didn’t have a mask to hide her identity, just off screen. He could crop the frame later, pan and scan it, if need be.

  You’re directing again, said a voice inside him.

  Well, he shouldn’t be that dramatic. The voice was Keith’s own, maybe a little more of a whisper than his usual internal monologue. There was no demon hiss to it, no particular malevolence at all, simply a gentle touch of sarcasm.

  Keith Lumbra rides again. The man simply can’t stop making movies. Kidnap him and guess what? He’ll find a way to make art! Would this be his final picture? Would it make any sense without rolling live sound? And would he be around to sit in the edit bay?

  He thought about the money that Teeks must have spent to put this all together. It was a crazy amount to invest, especially for a man who didn’t seem to spend any money on his car.

  The travel expenses alone must have dwarfed the entire production budget of Incest Virgin Massacre, Keith’s latest feature before the abduction, though he’d been working on two more that hadn’t yet been completed.

  Was there anything he could do to stop this madness from where he was sitting?

  No, nothing, not in as bad a shape as he was, physically.

  He drummed his fingers on the hard drive and watched Rory lower the smaller man’s lifeless body to the ground. The corpse’s knees folded in under, leaving the body in the position of an awkward prayer.

  No. All Keith could do now was direct. He had to document what was going on here. Bearing witness would be his contribution. Wasn’t that how most extreme horror guys (and they were all guys) tried to justify the movies they made? I’m not endorsing the content. It’s fiction. But it tells you something about the world, man.

  Keith could lie and say that he was doing such a good job of logging coverage for the authorities, so that they could build some kind of hypothetical case. But it was more than that. />
  He was doing this for his audience, one last time.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was hard for Marcus to sleep. Yes, the ‘talent’ had their own cabin. But the level of amenities provided had been greatly exaggerated when Teeks had pitched him in the supermarket.

  Instead of a separate, free-standing building for the male and female guests, a flimsy canvas partition had been constructed in the middle of the cabin, leaving four beds in their side, six for the women’s.

  No. Not beds, bunks. Bunk beds.

  Teeks had showed the guests to the door, wished them a goodnight, and then begged his leave. They’d entered, and Marcus saw another opportunity for his politeness to screw him out of comfort. It was unlikely that he’d have another roommate besides Ivan Butinelli, but Marcus threw his shoulder bag onto the top of the nearest bunk and laid his jacket across the floor-level bed, marking his territory.

  He wasn’t taking any chances. He wasn’t going to risk sleeping on a twin bed suspended six feet off the ground.

  “Hey, you up?” a voice said in the dark cabin.

  The whisper took Marcus by surprise. Not that Ivan Butinelli was snoring or anything, but he’d assumed that the porn star would have had an easier time falling asleep. It bothered Marcus that they were in a sparsely populated children’s summer camp, but what little he’d gleaned about Butinelli’s character made Marcus think the man was less than introspective.

  “Yeah, I’m up,” Marcus replied, not whispering himself. He was too self-conscious that hushed conversations after lights-out was the exact kind of thing that 12-year-olds did at sleepovers.

  “Oh,” Ivan’s voice said from the other side of the dark room. He sounded disappointed. “I was trying to see if the girl was up, actually. Tammy. I thought you were asleep, man.”

  “Oh. Makes sense,” Marcus said, no real reason why he should feel so embarrassed.

  There was a long pause while, presumably, Ivan waited for a reply from the other side of the partition. None came and Marcus heard the other man shift in his bed, place his feet on the floor and cross the room to the window over the door.

  Marcus stretched his feet out, pushing his head up on his pillow by pressing against the bed frame. He was unnerved to see Butinelli outlined in moonlight. The man was wearing underwear briefer than boxer briefs. It was a body builder’s Speedo, but Butinelli lacked the toned physique that was meant to accompany such a garment.

  Butinelli wasn’t completely out of shape, but struck Marcus as the kind of guy who hit the gym only for the chest press and some bicep curls. No legs, no cardio. He could almost hear the man’s excuse in his head: I get enough cardio at work. Har har!

  Butinelli leaned into the door, face to the window. His gut hung over his waistband and cast a shadow over his lower half. That was good: the shadow granted partial modesty to the man’s claim to fame.

  Marcus didn’t really know much about how the porn industry worked, but there was no way the belly was helping Butinelli’s career. It was certainly not what Marcus wanted to look at when he closed the shades and turned on privacy mode on his browser. The gut itself could be the reason why he was here right now, in the woods of Kentucky, instead of crunching on handfuls of Cialis in a Burbank McMansion.

  “See anything?” Marcus asked.

  “Trees and more trees,” the other man replied.

  “It doesn’t creep you out, just a little, that there are so few of us here in the middle of nowhere? That we had to be driven so far once we landed?” Marcus paused. No answer came so he elaborated. “I mean, who in their right mind could be coming to this thing? No fan of mine, I don’t think.”

  “Eh, not really scared. This,” Butinelli started. He waved a hand at the window, the pale skin of his underarm becoming a slash of reflected moonlight from where Marcus lay. “This is Mickey Mouse forest. At least to me. I grew up north of Kiev. If you want to see scary fuckin’ wilderness: drive an hour north or east of my hometown. This is nothing. There we have wolves. Your wolves here? In zoos and parks? They’re like dogs. Our wolves? They have to be big so they can take down the wild pigs. Those are scary, too.”

  “Kiev? So that means you’re full Russian...er,” Marcus tried to consult what little geography he knew. “Ukrainian? Does that mean the Italian thing’s a stage name?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Butinelli said, causing further confusion to Marcus’ questions about his lineage. When he was done talking he pinched at a patch of razor burn at the bottom of his stomach, working at either a blemish or ingrown hair with one of his fingernails. It was the kind of thing most people did when they were sure no one was watching. But Butinelli had made a career out of being filmed doing something most people considered private, so maybe his barometer was a little screwy.

  It was strange and terrible how much Marcus’s eyes had adjusted to the starlight, that he could watch this.

  They sat quietly for a moment, Marcus sitting up with his back against the pillow headboard, finally feeling the weight of sleep pressing against him. Not that Butinelli had put him at ease, telling him about the forests of Ukraine, but at least now there was someone standing watch.

  “Now that’s creepy,” Butinelli said, breaking the silence an indeterminate amount of time later. The words caused Marcus to nod his chin against his chest and realize that he’d been in the middle of falling asleep. His lower lip felt wet and he pressed a hand to his sternum to make sure he hadn’t drooled onto himself. He had, but only a little.

  “What is?” Marcus asked, finding it difficult to get the words out, he was so tired.

  “There’s a guy out there dragging a prop body through the woods,” Butinelli said and pointed out the window. “He must be setting up for tomorrow.”

  “Weird,” Marcus said, feeling so much more comfortable as he squared his shoulders with the pillow, the memory of the exchange mixing itself up with a dream as Ivan Butinelli said one last thing Marcus didn’t catch before slipping away into unconsciousness.

  In his dream it sounded like, “Someone’s hauling a body.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Clarissa rarely used nighttime mode on her phone. She only ever considered turning it on when Toby was in one of his excitable deal-making moods and it seemed likely that he would attempt to call her in the middle of the night. Nighttime mode silenced text messages that would otherwise vibrate and sent all incoming calls to voicemail.

  But with Toby sleeping in the same room, she hadn’t thought to turn the feature on.

  After all, outside of the little old lady who ran her dry cleaner and Merry Maids, Toby was the only person who called her with any regularity. Maybe she should try internet dating.

  Considering that no one called her, she was surprised to be woken at 8 a.m., not by the sunlight sneaking around the cabin’s drapes, but by the buzz of two texts, one after the other.

  In a paralytic half-sleep, she reached over to silence the phone, but wound up reading the text anyway.

  Hey. Soooo sorry but there’s been a family emergency. That’s what that call was last night I need to

  The message ended, then continued.

  Get back to LA. I had Mr. Teeks arrange me a ride to the airport. Break a leg! Good weekend!

  This early in the morning, it was hard for Clarissa to make much sense out of the messages, but she had no problem getting the gist on her first time through and no problem articulating a feeling to go along with that understanding.

  Fuck, she thought.

  Toby had family? She was 99% certain that he was an unmarried only-child, but she couldn’t remember if one or both of his parents were still alive.

  The thought that Toby, no spring chicken, had parents who certainly had to be elderly was more depressing and vivid than anything should have been this early in the morning. Clarissa imagined Toby taking care of his mother, an old woman of ninety-something who maybe even lived with Toby. The amount of time he spent on Clarissa meant that he was splitting his time be
tween two old ladies, maybe even neglecting his poor, arthritic, possibly demented mother in favor of running to Jamba Juice for Clarissa. What if the family emergency had been his mother dying?

  She knew that it was a self-centered leap to make, but with only Clarissa left for Toby to take care of, what kind of Norman Bates relationship would the two of them form in her twilight years?

  Considering the circumstances, how she hadn’t even known the most cursory facts about his life, she couldn’t be mad at him. But neither did Clarissa relish the thought of making it through the weekend alone.

  Not really awake but not really resting, she lay in bed for another hour. The hour ended when the squeal of a bullhorn roused her.

  “Testing. Testing. Can you hear me in the booth? Thumbs up?”

  It was Kimberly’s voice, amplified for maximum annoyance.

  For a “production assistant” at the camp, the girl seemed to be doing an awful lot of work. Maybe they didn’t know what the term meant in Kentucky. Kimberly’s main concern should have been learning how the guests took their coffee and when she needed to go feed parking meters. Full stop. And there were probably no meters out in the woods of Kentucky, anyway. So just the coffee then.

  “Good morning, campers!” she giggled at this salutation, then corrected herself: “I’m only kidding. Good morning honored guests! Breakfast will be served in the main building in just fifteen minutes. The first group of attendees isn’t expected to arrive until ten-thirty or eleven. Which means you’ll have time to eat in peace and relax. Get to know each other. And a chance to get into character. I’ll see you there!”

  Clarissa sat up, considered showering, but then considered how nice breakfast sounded. She couldn’t allow herself to get her hopes up, though. She’d eaten enough “complimentary” green room breakfasts in her life to know that what usually passed for a banquet at these things was a communal bowl of dry cereal and stack of day-old pastries.