Monsters, Movies & Mayhem Read online

  Book Description

  Lights! Camera! Monsters?

  Sometimes you go to the movies. And sometimes, the movies—and their monsters—come to you. At any moment, without notice, monsters once relegated to the screen become a reality. Aliens and demons, dragons and ghosts, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and seemingly ordinary people who are just plain evil.

  Join award-winning authors Jonathan Maberry, Fran Wilde, David Gerrold, Rick Wilber and others for 23 all-new tales of haunted theaters, video gods, formidable demons, alien pizza, and delirious actors. Each story takes you to the silver screen with monstrous results.

  Funny or grim, unsettling or cozy… You’ll laugh! You’ll sigh! You’ll scream!

  Grab popcorn—and good running shoes—and enjoy the show.

  Monsters, Movies & Mayhem

  Edited by

  Kevin J. Anderson

  Monsters, Movies & Mayhem

  Copyright © 2020 WordFire Press

  Individual Copyright Information Available at End of Book

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-106-6

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-105-9

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-107-3

  Kevin J. Anderson, Executive Editor

  Editorial Team: Kelly Lynn Colby, Elizbeth Drisko, Angela Johnson, Ashley King, Scott Lee, Tracy Leonard Nakatani, James Romag, Kailey Urbaniak, and Carol Wyrick

  * * *

  This anthology was made possible with assistance from Draft2Digital and Western Colorado University

  * * *

  Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

  Published by

  WordFire Press, LLC

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  * * *

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  * * *

  WordFire Press eBook Edition 2020

  WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2020

  WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2020

  * * *

  Printed in the USA

  * * *

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Introduction

  Jonathan Maberry

  Gavin Funke’s Monster Movie Marathon

  Luciano Marano

  Flickering Dusk of the Video God

  David Gerrold

  Michael Thinks the House Is Haunted

  Jesse Sprague

  Atropos Green

  C.H. Hung

  Last Sunset Home

  Kevin Pettway

  Love Your Mother

  David Boop

  Progress Grows Out of Motion

  Julie Frost

  When the Shift Hits the Fan

  Shannon Fox

  Hyde Park

  Brendan Mallory

  Make Me a Star

  Linda Maye Adams

  Alien Pizza

  Sam Knight

  Whoever Writes Monsters

  Hailey Piper

  Toad Man, Toad Man

  Rick Wilber

  False Bay

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  Z Is for Zombie

  Ben Monroe

  Vinegar Syndrome

  Charles Maclay

  Beer with Friends

  Irene Radford

  Motivating A Monster

  James A. Hearn

  Tunnel Visions

  Ryan F. Healey

  Our Lady of Celluloid

  Karina Fabian

  Josie’s Last Straw

  B.D. Prince

  The Last Drive-in Movie

  Fran Wilde

  Welcome to the Underhill Cinema

  Additional Copyright Information

  About the Editor

  If You Liked …

  Other WordFire Press Anthologies

  Introduction

  This anthology came about as a group project for my Publishing MA students at the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, where I teach. During the summer residency, the nine students brainstormed ideas for an original anthology, and they came up with Monsters, Movies & Mayhem as their favorite. They wrote up their pitch for the book, defined exactly what kind of stories they were looking for.

  The students sent out a wide call for submissions and received over four hundred stories in the slushpile. They waded through them, weeded out the ones that weren’t ready for prime time, chose the best, and wrote up publication contracts. The wrote rejection letters for all the others. With generous assistance from Draft2Digital and support from Western Colorado University, we were able to pay professional rates for these stories.

  They waded through them, buried under stories not formatted properly, or that had nothing to do with the anthology subject (one guy sent us a list of tourist sites in Manhattan…and then resubmitted the manuscript after we rejected it!). They needed to weigh hard and visceral stories against light and funny ones, balance the number of werewolf stories against zombie stories or haunted theater stories. After several iterations, they weeded out the ones that weren’t ready for prime time, chose the best, and wrote up publication contracts.

  They worked with the authors to copy edit and proofread their individual pieces. They designed the cover and the interior, produced the book, and published it in hardcover, paperback, and ebook as their graduation project.

  Much more than just a class project, though, Monsters, Movies & Mayhem is filled with remarkable stories, some terrifying, some funny, some heart wrenching. Let the lights go down, lean back in your seat, and enjoy them like popcorn.

  * * *

  —Kevin J. Anderson, Director, Publishing Program

  Graduate Program in Creative Writing

  Western Colorado University

  Gavin Funke’s Monster Movie Marathon

  (Bring the Whole Family!)

  Jonathan Maberry

  Gavin Funke’s Monster Movie Marathon

  -1-

  Gavin Funke sat in the dark and watched his monster movies.

  One after the other.

  All day.

  Well into the night.

  He had the theater mostly to himself. The popcorn was fresh and the smell of it filled the entire theater with buttery goodness. The Coke was cool, not cold, but that was okay. Making ice was a luxury, and he needed as much juice as the generators would give him to run the projectors and the air conditioning.

  The theater was nearly quiet. A few people made some noise, but there was always a little of that. Over in the corner, in the darkest and most private spot in the auditorium he could hear soft moans.

  Gavin didn’t care about that. He was not that kind of voyeur.

  He sat with his feet wedged between the backs of the two seats in front of him, his sneakers parted in a Vee so as not to obstruct his view. On the screen a black man in a stained white shirt
was hammering boards over the windows of a farmhouse. There were banging sounds on the doors as clumsy fists pounded on the doors and walls. Anyone with half a brain could tell those boards weren’t going to stop anyone. Even if Gavin hadn’t seen this movie a dozen times he’d know that. They were nailed crookedly and in haste. And they were straight-nailed, not toe-nailed. Not screwed securely. Wouldn’t take much at all.

  “Dumbass,” he yelled at the screen.

  But the actor playing the guy in the movie with the monster didn’t listen. None of them ever did. They did stupid things because they were stupid characters. And they died. A lot of them died. Sometimes all of them died.

  But not Gavin Funke.

  No sir.

  He was the star of this movie and he was not going to make any mistakes at all. Not one.

  Sure, there had been a learning curve, but the point was that he did learn.

  He dug into the tub and pulled out a fist of popcorn, not caring that some of it fell onto his shirt or lap, or onto the floor. That was what brooms were for.

  A foot kicked his chair but he didn’t bother turning and instead hissed, “Mom! Shhhhh!”

  Another kick.

  “Mom, c’mon—how ’bout it?”

  Kick.

  Gavin abruptly stood up, shot his mother a lethal glare, and moved to the row in front. Not the perfect distance, but still good. And no kicking.

  He ate the popcorn more slowly, and it lasted all the way up until the hero got killed. He kept hoping the movie would—just for once—end differently. But it stubbornly refused to do so.

  -2-

  Gavin slept in because he hated morning. That’s why he arranged the movie marathons to go well past midnight. Last night was zombie night. From one yesterday afternoon until the last credits rolled up a minute after five a.m.

  He was bloated with popcorn and Milk Duds and Night & Day and some shady off-brand beef jerky because, hey, he needed protein and all the good stuff was gone. Marathons were good for the soul but hard on the colon, and he spent a bad hour in the chemical toilet out by the dumpsters. Gavin was wise, though, and daubed Vicks on his upper lip to kill the smells. He read nearly three chapters of an autobiography by an actor with a huge chin. It was pretty funny, and laughing helped his colon do its business.

  Then he went inside, took a shower, dressed in new clothes that came from JCPenny. The belt was a tighter fit than it should have been and he wondered if all that candy was nudging him up a size. That could be a problem because all he could manage was off the rack.

  “No more Milk Duds,” he promised. But that was a low bar because he didn’t have that many boxes left anyway. No way he’d cut out the Night & Day because the licorice helped him move things along.

  Gavin turned the house lights up and cleaned the theater floor. Nothing worse than walking on all that sticky mess. As he worked he listened to Tom Waits songs on his Bluetooth earbuds. He liked Waits’s older stuff, back when it was more dramatic and melodic. Currently Tom Traubert’s Blues was breaking his damn heart, like it always did. Gavin had his own theories on what the lyrics meant. They were timeless. People leave, things end, hearts get broken. Hardly mattered what the singer intended. That guy was dealing with his own blues. While he knelt down to fish under a chair with a dust brush, he wondered if Tom Waits was still alive. Probably. Guy like him would find some way to figure things out. He’d get his crap sorted. Gavin was sure of it.

  Maybe one of these days he’d take a drive north to find out. He thought Waits lived in Pasadena or someplace like that. Up that way. But the singer had been raised right here in San Diego, Gavin thought.

  The song ended and Gavin paused to push the buttons to play it again, but then he stopped, looking down at the debris his last brush sweep had gathered. There was some of his own popcorn, and a stray Milk Dud that still looked good.

  And a ring.

  Gold. Slender. Very pretty. With delicate, old-world Viking tracery that twisted all the way around the band. He picked it up and sat back on his heels. The ring was dusty, as if it had been there a long time.

  Had it? Could he have missed it the other times he cleaned the floor?

  It made his heart hurt and the tears ambushed him. He didn’t even feel them coming but suddenly they were there. Shoving their way out of him, choking him, kicking at the walls of his lungs. He caved forward so suddenly his forehead banged against the floor. It hurt but he didn’t care. Not one bit.

  He closed his fist around the ring and tried to push the fist into his chest. If he could have managed that he’d have buried the ring in the tear-moist soil of his heart.

  “Mom …”

  The single word escaped his lips. He blubbered it, and the word slipped free and fell onto the dirty floor.

  -3-

  It took a lot for Gavin to get up off the floor.

  It took so much more for him to return the ring to his mother.

  He didn’t know how he actually managed it, but he was aware of the cost. It was more than he was able to afford.

  Getting to his feet would be like jacking up an unloaded truck. He was only five-nine and stocky though not yet fat, but his body felt like it weighed three or four tons. Even lifting his head away from the dirty floor was almost too much, and for a while he knelt there, stupid with pain. His nose was thick with snot and it ran, diluted by tears, over his lips and chin, hung there in pendulous strands, and fell unheeded to his chest.

  “Mom …”

  He felt something on his face and brushed at it, and watched bits of popcorn and a strand of half-chewed red licorice whip fall away. He frowned at the red candy. How long had that been there? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any, and yet it had been swept into the light by the same brush that discovered the ring. What the hell was under that chair? A black hole? The Bermuda Triangle of lost theater stuff?

  The ring was tiny but heavy in his hand.

  “Mom,” he said again. His voice sounded a little less broken to his ears, and that gave him the courage to try and stand.

  Standing. Yeah. Jesus.

  That took forever. He braced one hand on an arm rest of a seat. The wood was polished and cool and only mildly sticky. He fixed his eyes on the red fabric that covered the seat and back. Did every theater everywhere in the world use that same stuff? Was it a rule? A regulation? He didn’t know.

  He flexed the muscles in his arm and shoulder and chest and pushed.

  His body resisted, as if it and gravity were conspiring to keep him down on his knees. The traitors.

  But … no.

  This was not an act of betrayal. It was a mercy. To help him in this effort was to be complicit in more self-inflicted harm. Finding the ring was bad enough. Looking too closely at it was foolish, because seeing meant knowing. Knowing meant understanding and accepting.

  He wanted to scream. To hurl a string of the most obscene words he knew—and after all the movies he’d seen, Gavin knew them all—but that would be wrong. Mom would hear him. She never liked it when people cursed. The only time she’d ever hit him growing up was when he’d dropped an f-bomb by accident after stubbing his little toe on the edge of his bedroom door on a Christmas morning when he was nine. He’d come bolting out, all happy and filled with Yuletide greed, having already peeked after his weary parents had gone to bed. There was a mountain of brightly wrapped boxes stacked like a city of goodness around the base of the glimmering tree. Gavin hadn’t been able to sleep a wink, then when he heard his parents’ door open, he’d whipped back his own and rushed into the hall. His little toe hit the corner and folded sideways with a sharp crack. Mom hadn’t heard that, though. All she heard was him howling that word over and over. And she’d given him a hearty slap.

  As he knelt there, preparing for another attempt at standing, he thought about that morning. Instead of opening presents, he’d fallen, clutching his foot. The toe was standing out at the wrong angle and the whole foot was starting to swell and darken. With a
shock of horror, Mom understood what had happened. She screamed. Dad came running. Then there were hugs and kisses and apologies. They bundled Gavin into the car and drove straight to the urgent care, leaving every gift unopened and forlorn. When they’d returned around one-thirty in the afternoon, Gavin was half dopey with painkillers and his foot was swathed in protective gauze, with the broken toe buddy-taped to the next one.

  Mom had been so contrite and embarrassed for having hit him that his own infraction for the use of that word was never spoken about. Then or ever again. She never hit him again. In retrospect, he realized that she’d simply been exhausted by sitting up until three a.m. wrapping all those presents, and then been startled by the dramatic opening of his door and him rushing out and curses filling the hall. A perfect storm that made the morning a disaster, but became a much sanitized anecdote for years and years after. It was even told at the reception at Aunt Joan’s house after Dad’s funeral.