to the altar. She stood facing the lead actor, who in fact was holding up her joint.
She started to plead with him. "If this is all about that joint, then you should know something. I just came here to get a boyfriend. I wanted Skip to go out with me and I thought that that would make us cool. But he's not into it. I thought he was, but he isn't. So you can keep the joint. I don't really even smoke the stuff. I was just using it as a way to catch his interest. Come on, you guys were young once. You know what it's like. Can't you just let us go? We’ll never bother you again?"
None of the abominations made a sound. They all simply stared straight ahead. The lead zombie turned its head down to face Nadia. Something dropped out of both eyes sockets and hit the table. Nadia stop screaming long enough to see what the items were and screamed even louder when she realized it was his eyeballs.
Skip's couldn’t really tell what it was that had fallen from the monster’s head, but he could guess. He now knew what kind of trouble they were really in. He tried to slide down the seat and onto the floor, but skeletal fingers hooked into the flesh of his shoulders, causing tremendous paralyzing pain. Bony fingers reached out from under the seat and pulled his legs tight.
Nadia began to whine as the reality of her situation set in. They weren’t wearing costumes or masks. They were actual zombies and skeletons. Some of them had skulls for faces. Others had sunken eyeballs and rotting faces. She tried to drop to the floor, even picking up her feet so as to make her deadweight. But all that did was cause the corpses holding her to move forward and deposit her upon the altar.
Skip watched in agony as a pair of skeletons at each end of the table grabbed her by the wrists and ankles and stretched her out on the altar. They pulled her tight and then became rigid like bedposts. Nadia wriggled desperately. “Skip! I can’t move! Help!”
Skip yelled at the band of ghouls. "Let us go! We've done nothing to you! Just let us go!”
The head zombie raised its hands above its head again and Kyle saw a dagger in its hand. Even though there was very little light on this end of the theater, a single shaft of light glinted off the metal. It was a curvy blade like the kind you'd see in an old Three Stooges episode in which the boys had gone to the Middle East and faced angry Arabs.
They mean to sacrifice her, his brain screamed at him. He screamed at the top of his lungs. He begged them to stop. He pleaded with them to let them go. But they ignored him. The blade came down and Nadia screamed once and then fell silent. She stopped moving.
The murderous creature backed away from the altar while the others resumed dancing. Skip found himself free of hands. He leapt to his feet and bolted for Nadia.
“Wake up!” he hollered at her, shaking her. But she was gone.
The monsters swirled around him like Khlystys whipping themselves into a frenzy. Strangely, they didn’t come after him. They just spun and shifted, dancing around the stage until he could take it no more. He clapped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyelids tightly together.
When he reopened them a few moments later, the things were slinking back into the shadows. He caught only glimpses of them as they disappeared into the darkness. And then he was alone with Nadia’s corpse.
Blood trickled down the sides of her abdomen and dripped onto the surface of the altar, creating an expanding pool that threatened to run over the sides and onto the stage.
Skip inspected the girl who just a few moments before had been his only lifeline back to a normal life. She was gone now and so were his chances of a normal life. What could he do about any of it?
He ran from the stage. He bolted through the lobby and burst out of the building. Diving through the hole in the fence, he rolled a few times and leapt to his feet. He spun around to look at the building.
The Regal looked as deserted as the moment he arrived earlier. Have I dreamed it? Did any of that just happen?
He examined the building, searching for something that would indicate it hadn’t been a dream, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
The gravity of the situation began to sink in. A dead girl in a theater. He, trespassing, was the only witness to her paranormal murder. There was no one who would believe such a story as he would tell it to the authorities. He wasn’t sure he believed it either. The authorities would see him as a dejected lover who murdered the object of his affections.
What to do? Where to go?
He began walking, not knowing where he was headed. Then he started running.
The End.
About the author
Scot McAtee lives in Indiana with his family. His novels Zombie Zero and Zombie Zero: Survival of the Deadest are available in paperback and ebook. Casket Creek and I Am Food are both available as ebooks. Order or download them from your favorite bookstore today.
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