“No signal,” BK said. “This is too weird for me, Billy. Let’s—”
Two things happened right then. The lights in the whole attraction suddenly went out—and with the murk under the late afternoon clouds, the whole place went very dark—and then the screams began. Not just the screams of the kids out in the field…but screams everywhere.
Billy turned. “What the f—?”
A figure rushed at them. White face, red eyes, fangs—and an orange and black PINE DEEP HAUNTED HAYRIDE STAFF T-shirt.
“Mr. Kingsman!” yelled the vampire. “Something’s wrong. All the power’s out. ”
“It’s okay, Danny,” BK said. “Get one of the ATVs out of the barn and run the circuit. Everyone comes back here. ”
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t know yet, but let’s round everyone up. Come on, Danny, chop chop. ”
The kid nodded and dashed for the barn.
Billy said, “I’ll take the haunted house. The emergency lights should have kicked in, but I’ll bring everyone out. ” There were more explosions. He ran up the path.
Another white-faced figure in an orange T-shirt was coming around the far end of the tractor. BK waved him over. “Chet, good…listen, something’s going down so we’re pulling everyone in. Do me a favor and—”
Chet, grinning with his mouthful of fangs, just leapt at him and clamped black-taloned fingers around BK’s throat as he drove him back against the flatbed.
3
Film actor Ken Foree was nearing the end of his lecture about the allegory and social commentary in the George Romero Living Dead films when the drive-in’s big screen changed from an image of a younger Foree dressed like Philly SWAT shooting it out with a bunch of zombies at a rural shopping mall to a flat expanse of silver-gray emptiness.
“In Dawn of the Dead the consumerism of the American—” he said, and then his microphone cut out along with all of the lights throughout the drive-in’s big lot. Annoyed, he turned toward the projection booth mounted above the bunkerlike concession stand, but it, too, was dark. Instantly fifty cars started honking their horns and people began to grumble loudly.
Foree held up his hands to try and quiet the crowd. “People, people!” he called, pitching his theater-trained baritone above the din. “Let’s all calm down. Give the man a chance to fix the problem. ”
As they quieted down, he continued talking, telling some jokes about mishaps on the sets of the monster movies and TV shows he’d worked on. Folks began to get out of their cars and draw closer, and Foree encouraged them with come-here gestures. Not surprisingly, many of the attendees were dressed in bloodstained clothes and made up to look like the living dead. Foree took it in stride. Star Trek conventions get Klingons, I get the walking dead, he mused.
He saw that more people were coming around from the far side of the concession stand, and these new arrivals seemed to be more in the vampire motif: fangs, bloody mouths, dark eyes, though they had the classic zombie vacant expressions and slow, shuffling gait down perfectly. He waved them in, too.
4
They’d put Tom Savini in the main house of the theater department and there were two sets of attendees. The general admission crowd sat in the theater seats while the MFA film students were onstage. One by one Savini was transforming them from ordinary college kids into monsters or victims of monsters.
The makeup effects man was a legend in the business and had pioneered many of the wound effects that were now standard in horror and action films. He was describing how latex and other materials were used to create the effect of a zombie tearing a chunk out of someone’s arm when the lights went out.
The theater went totally dark.
Savini sighed. The crowd immediately started getting restive, so he pitched his voice loud enough to carry and said, “Apparently the dean didn’t pay the electric bill. ” It had the desired effect of getting the startled students to laugh with him rather than to panic. “Everyone sit tight. There should be emergency lights…ah, there we are. ”
The lights came on. The screaming began a moment later. The blood that sprayed the walls was not stage blood.
5
The tingling ant-crawly feeling on the back of Mike’s neck intensified and just as the hospital emergency lights kicked on he turned away from Val and Weinstock and looked at the window for what seemed like an hour but was really a fragment of a second.
“Down!” he screamed as he spun and dove at Val, tackling her so that they collapsed between the bed and the bathroom wall; even before they landed Mike reached up and grabbed the front of Weinstock’s hospital gown and pulled him right out of the bed. Jonatha staggered back from them as they fell and she bumped into Newton, who tripped backward, dragging her with him—a clumsy move that saved both their lives because in the next fragment of a second a new blast ripped through the town and the big tempered-glass window imploded, sending thousands of flying glass daggers scything through the room. The window side of Weinstock’s bed was shredded, glass needles jabbed into the walls, and the shockwave swept the vase of flowers off the bedside table and smashed them against the wall. Then, as if drawing a deep breath after a scream, the hot air from the blast was sucked back out, leaving Weinstock’s room a darkened and glittering debris field.
There was glass everywhere. They all crouched where they had fallen, more terrified of all the glass than of the blast.
Val was the first to move, and she pushed back against Mike, who still lay half on top of her, his weight on her lower back, pressing her stomach into the floor. “Mike,” she said urgently, “the baby…”
He instantly arched up over her, balancing on fingers and toes while glass tinkled off his back; Val wormed carefully out from under him. Weinstock was tucked into a tight corner, his face contorted in agony as he clutched his wounded arm to his chest. Blood seeped through his bandages, evidence of ruptured stitches, and he curled his body up like he was stuffed into a box of pain.