“Check this one.” I pulled out a 1970s-era poster of a leisure-suited vampire karate chopping the necks of two drug dealers. Behind him, a werewolf angled his hairy torso out the window of a gold Cadillac, his giant canine teeth bared like he meant drug dealer–eating business. I read the tagline aloud as if I were a movie announcer: “‘Dr. Drac and Mr. Wolf: They’re here to put a bite on crime.’ Okay, seriously. How is this even a horror movie?”
“It’s Dracula and the Wolfman. Doesn’t get more old school than that,” Dani said and shoulder-checked me, and I swear I felt it everywhere at once.
I grinned like a doofus. “No. Huh-uh. This is an abomination. It’s, like, Law and Order: Transylvania. The Wolfman has a gun. By all the horror gods, how is that possible? He doesn’t even have thumbs!”
Dani laughed, and I’m not gonna lie, I just wanted to keep telling jokes so I could hear her laugh more.
“Nice swag.” Dani picked up a realistic-looking bow-and-arrow set, a special giveaway from Robin Hood: Prince of Darkness. “You could do some damage with this. Seriously, they let kids have these?” She pressed the arrow against the bow’s string, aiming it playfully at my heart.
I put up my hands. “Careful with that.”
“Don’t worry.” Dani lowered it again. “I only took one semester of archery. My biggest score was impaling Coach Pelson in the ass.”
“Whoa, that was you? You could be in the inevitable remake of Hippolyta Rises from the Grave, Pinewood Studios, 1966.”
Dani perched carefully on top of a replica tombstone. “You really love these old movies, don’t you?”
“Yeah. True horror is based in all that deeply human stuff—sorrow, fear, doubt, anxiety. Desire.” I swallowed awkwardly. “But the new movies? Five minutes in, somebody’s getting cut up by a chain saw or sewn into a skin suit. There are no emotional stakes. It’s completely impersonal, like Internet porn.”
Shit. Why did I say “porn”?
“Did I ever tell you that my parents’ first date was a horror movie?” Dani said, and I shook my head. “Yeah. My grandmother is mad Catholic, and she wouldn’t let my mom go on a date without my aunt Yoli tagging along. My dad said that Yoli screamed so much the manager made her wait it out in the lobby. And then my dad was all, ‘Middle fingers, we out!’ He slipped through the fire door with my mom and they went dancing in a club down the street. So, in a weird way, I owe my existence to a horror movie.” She smiled at me, and my heart started playing a punk beat.
“Wow. Cool,” I barely managed. The heat was starting to catch up to me. I wiped a thin layer of sweat from the back of my neck.
Dani looked me right in the eyes again. “UT has a great film school, you know. You wouldn’t be that far from Deadwood. No—wait! Don’t make that face! I’m serious.”
“Yeah, yeah…”
“Kevin!” She wasn’t smiling anymore. “What are you afraid of? For real.”
For real? Spiders. People leaving me. Not being good enough. Rejection. Too much responsibility. Being buried alive by an escaped psychopath. Losing out on a chance to date the coolest girl I knew. Turning out like my dad. The list was endless. But mostly I was afraid of a future so terrifying in its unformed vastness that it pressed in on me with its bullying fists until I was afraid to take a real breath. I was afraid of being left behind while Dani and Dave spun toward that future. But admitting my fear only felt like giving it more power over me.
“I fear nothing,” I said in a fake German accent. “For I am Van Hotsprings, killer of vampire sperm at precisely one hundred and four degrees.”
Dani’s mouth settled into a sideways squiggle of disappointment. “Mm-m-m. Okay. Well, whatever. Let’s go up,” she said, flat, and hopped off the headstone.
Fuck. In my head, a new movie, Night of the Living Dumbass, played:
INT. Basement. Bad, bad, night.
The zombie horde attacks Kevin but stops when they realize that killing him is redundant. Cut. Roll credits. Fin.
When we got back upstairs, the lights were only operating at half power. The AC was still blasting, though. The sudden cold of it made me shiver. John-O had his DemonVision glasses on. He’d propped open the door with his foot and was watching the movie through the crack.
“John-O,” I said. He didn’t respond. “Yo, Earth to John. Did you set the popcorn maker for a fresh batch? John?”
I snapped my fingers near his ears. Finally, I yanked the glasses off his nose, and he blinked a few times. “Oh. Hey. When did you get here?”
“Son, haven’t your mother and I warned you about the dangers of marijuana?” I said. John-O still seemed dazed. “Seriously. You okay, dude?”
“Yeah. I think so. It’s so weird. I was watching the movie and, I don’t know, for a minute there, it felt like I was actually inside of it.”
“O-o-k-a-ay.” Dani loaded fresh GMO-infected kernels into the popcorn hopper. With the bow slung over her shoulder and the arrow sticking up out of the back of her pants, she looked completely badass.
“The thing is, I wanted to be there. I didn’t want to leave,” John-O continued. “And then I thought I saw these creatures outside the window of the old mansion.”
“Yeah, John-O. That’s because it’s a horror movie.” I left him to join Dani behind the counter. I didn’t have anything to do, really; I just wanted to be close to her. To look busy, I pushed the ice around in the big silver bin, breaking up the chunks with the scooper and wishing I could rewind this rapidly devolving night.
“No. That’s not it.” John-O sounded pissed. “The next thing I knew, those things were inside the mansion. And somebody was calling my name. He told me the creatures needed permission to come out. He asked me to grant them permission.”
Dani looked concerned. “What did you say?”
“I said…” John-O twitched as if he were shaking off imaginary bugs. His voice deepened, like puberty on time lapse. “I said sure. Come on in.”
John-O started to go really wrong then. His blue eyes went bright red, and the flesh of his face warped as if burned by acid. His whole body jerked as he lurched toward the concessions stand.
“Holy shit,” Dani whispered, backing away.
John-O kept coming.
I leaped in front of Dani, lobbing boxes of Milk Duds like candy grenades. “Get back, freshman demon!”
The corner of one box caught John-O in the eye. Yowling, he yanked on the box, taking his eye with it.
“Dammit! I’ve got no service!” Beside me, Dani swished her cell above her head as if she could catch a connection in the air. “You piece of shit, Verizon!”
Two more demons pushed through the doors. One of them wore Bryan Jenks’s John Deere baseball cap, and if I had been afraid of that asshole before, I was pants-soilingly frightened now. His mouth was huge and round, with sharp nubbins of teeth. Demon-faced Bryan Jenks pushed the screeching John-O to the floor and bit into his neck, nearly severing his waxwork-like head.
“Go, go, go!” I pushed Dani ahead of me toward the projection room. We were up the stairs and through the door in record time.
“Don’t watch the movie!” I shouted, knocking Dave off his stool.
“What the hell?” Dave looked up, dazed. “Hey, it was just getting good. I felt like I was actually in the movie…”
“I think you were,” I said, trying desperately to catch my breath and not pass out. “That thing about the movie being cursed? Not bullshit. I think it steals your soul and turns you into some kind of demon-zomboid thing.”
Dani nodded, wide-eyed. “Truth. It got John-O. His face turned into fondue right in front of us! And then Bryan Jerks came out and started eating him!”