The Monster Apocalypse Read online

  Paul went in first. “I’m his son. He’s not going to kill me.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to kill you,” the second henchman said, wiping snot away from his upper lip. “I think Droz has in store for you a fate worse than death.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” Paul said. “You two know you’re nothing but my father’s stupid, mindless minions, with no thoughts of your own, and certainly no power—”

  The first henchman didn’t push against Paul’s back this time; he kicked him against the buttocks and watched with glee as Paul stumbled forward and smashed his mouth against the back of a pew.

  “Owww!” Paul shouted.

  “Don’t you talk to us that way. At least we have loyalty. At least we don’t fall in love with humans.”

  Paul stumbled back up to his feet and hunched over the pew. He looked out of breath, like he might puke all over the dusty ground. Then he turned around, an aggravated expression on his pale face.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” the first henchman said.

  Paul didn’t respond with words. He just spit black blood all over the creature’s face.

  “OK,” he said, wiping the black goo from his cheeks and forehead, “that was uncalled for.” He stepped toward Paul, pulled a sharp blade out of his jacket pocket, and threw his tiny top hat to the ground. “Enough with you!”

  He lunged toward Paul and hoisted the blade up high, ready to kill him once and for all.

  But the second henchman screamed, “Noooo!” and slammed his fists against the other’s guy’s right side, sending him down to the creaky floorboards. He pressed his feet on top of the other henchman’s chest and grabbed the blade away from him.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the second henchman asked.

  “Can’t we just kill him? Can’t we just do away with him?”

  “No! We have our orders!”

  Paul licked his lips, still tasting the icky blood in his mouth, and sat against the pew. He thought about making a run for it, but the portly henchman before him—who had more of a brain and a conscience than the other one—had that sharp, deadly blade in his hand. Paul knew they had orders to keep him alive, but if he tried to escape, he wasn’t going to have a shot. He was sixteen miles away from the freeway, after all. They’d catch up to him eventually.

  “You’re such a bastard,” the first henchman said, rising to his feet. He grabbed Paul with a tight, firm grip and pulled him to the front of the church. “I hope your father tortures you for centuries, and just when you can’t stand it anymore, I hope he starts all over again.”

  “You have a lot of rage,” Paul said, lifting his eyebrows. “You know that, right?”

  “Shut up. Move.”

  Paul looked back at the church’s exit, in the hopes that someone had already arrived to save him. Brin, maybe? Anaya? Even Ash, who he disagreed with at times but ultimately felt no animosity toward? But nobody stood at the top of the church steps. Nobody was coming.

  The first henchman shoved him into the back of the room, toward the archaic organ player, which looked like it hadn’t been used in over a hundred years.

  Henchman number one turned to Henchman number two. “You know what to do.”

  The second guy nodded. “Here goes nothing.”

  Paul watched as the slob of a vampire pulled the organ player toward him, slow at first, then fast, with one hard tug. He only pulled it about ten feet toward him, but that was more than enough; Paul looked down to see a hidden trap door.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “When did Dad put this in here?”

  “He had us make it last year,” the first henchman said. “It’s a faster way to the cells.”

  “The cells? Are you kidding me?”

  “We didn’t do this to you, Paul,” he said. “You brought this on yourself.”

  “If you’re going to put me in a jail cell, why don’t you just take me over to the real Bodie Jail? That’s been here forever. You wouldn’t have had to build or design a thing.”

  “That may be true,” the second henchman said, “but it’s also faded away so much that you’d break free of it the minute we left. We had to design a series of cells that could guarantee one simple thing: no escape.” He pulled open the trap door to reveal a winding staircase that led below the church.

  “You don’t expect me to go down there, do you?” Paul said.

  “Shut up,” both vampires said in unison, and they kicked him forward until he started finally walking down into the dark abyss.

  Paul didn’t like the lack of breathing room in the claustrophobic winding staircase, and he wondered how the two overweight vampires were even going to fit. He kept going, waiting for them to push and kick against his back. But they didn’t. He didn’t hear them talking. He couldn’t even hear their footsteps.

  After at least a minute of descending, Paul finally touched the bottom step. It wasn’t made of dirt, but of hard cement. He pushed past the staircase, dizzy for a moment, then stumbled into a hallway that featured not one but five small prison cells, all in a row. The first four cells had open doors, but the last one in the back looked to have its door locked tight. All the cells were equipped with shiny, metallic bars, and lit Tiki torches lined the right side of the freezing cold hallway.

  He turned back to the staircase and awaited his father’s two henchmen. But they were nowhere to be seen. After all he had been through, Paul was astonished to find that they had left him alone, before anyone had locked him into one of these tiny cells.

  “I guess they really did get stuck in the staircase,” he said with a smile. “Looks like… I’m free.”

  He took three steps forward, immediately in search of an exit, when a voice stopped him in his tracks.

  “Who’s there?” an elderly voice said from the farthest cell in the hallway. “Is someone there?”

  “Yes,” Paul whispered. He didn’t know why, but the voice sounded vaguely familiar.

  “You have to get me out of here,” the man said. “We’re going to die in here!”

  “Who is that?” Paul said. He walked toward the last cell, but didn’t come close to making it, or seeing the person inside.

  A figure grabbed his golf shirt from behind and tossed him into the center cell. The force of the throw was so great that Paul bashed his mouth again, this time against a hard cement wall. He collapsed to his chest and let out a long, painful sigh. He knew there was only one creature of the night who had that kind of strength.

  “Hello Dad,” Paul said, wiping the blood away from his face and peering up toward the shadowed figure at the front of the cell.

  “Hello Paul,” Droz said, stepping toward him. He wore a new top hat on his head, one more sleek and modern, with a strip of red that circled the bottom, and a bow tie that was glued on top. It looked more like a party hat than anything else, like Paul had just stepped into Bodie Ghost Town’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

  “Dad, I can explain—”

  “You don’t have to explain anything,” Droz said, cornering Paul in the back right of the cell, stopping just a few inches in front of Paul’s face. “You thought you could get away with it. You thought you could go live with that girl, that stupid girl. You thought you could attend high school, fall in love with a human, play fucking golf.”

  “Dad.” Paul stared up at his old man with heartache, with tension, with distraction, with utter sadness. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “Me neither,” Droz said, and he kicked his son’s face, hard, with the bottom of his black dress shoe. Paul slammed his back against the wall, then blinked his eyes a few times and prepared himself to cry. But he didn’t. He just stayed focused on the bloodied ground. He didn’t want to look at his father again. Not now, and not ever.

  Droz stared at his son for a moment—quietly, almost eerily—before he turned around and stepped back out of the cell. He pushed a button on the right side and watched as the barred door closed in
a matter of seconds. When it shut all the way, Droz locked it with his key.

  He pressed his face against the bars and took one last look at Paul.

  “Welcome back, my son,” Droz said. “Welcome… to the bowels of Hell.”

  Paul stayed put, not moving a muscle, as he listened to his father exit the hallway and slam another door in the distance. He waited, a minute or more, just to make sure his father wouldn’t return, before he scooted to the front of the cell and started inspecting the bars that kept him inside. He tightened his fists around them, then tried to kick one of them a few times. Nothing. Strong and sturdy. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Damn it,” Paul said.

  He stood up, stuck his arm through the bars as far as he could, and pressed his ice-cold fingers against the lock. He tried to wiggle it. He tried to pull it off.

  “Don’t even bother,” that familiar voice said, from Paul’s left. “I spent a day trying to break the lock. It’s no use.”

  Paul pressed his face against the bars. He wanted to see this man. He had talked to him before; he just couldn’t place him. “Hello?” Paul said. “Who is that?”

  “Prisoner number one,” he said with a chuckle. “You must be prisoner number two? How did you find this place, anyway? Did you try to investigate the deaths of Chace Anderson and Sawyer Neville, too?”

  “I… uhh…” Paul said. “Yes. Something like that.”

  “I just wanted to know what happened,” the man said. “Nobody takes two of my students away from me. Nobody!”

  Finally, Paul placed the voice. He opened his mouth in surprise and, despite the horrors of the last few minutes, actually laughed out loud.

  “Oh my God,” Paul said. “Principal Stine?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sunday had been the longest day of Brin’s life—but the day part of it was officially over. Night was here to stay.

  The last of the sunlight disappeared over the mountains as Crispin’s white van sped through the last of the Carson Valley signals, disappeared from civilization, and continued on the long, winding, desolate road that was US-395.

  Brin looked out the window and sighed as the sky turned pitch black. She was already scared about what she was—what they all were—about to face in Bodie Ghost Town, and she didn’t think it the popular choice to storm the empty compound at least until the morning sunlight appeared again.

  But Brin knew she wouldn’t be able to wait that long. This wasn’t just a mission to put a stop to the league of evil vampires, to kill Droz once and for all. This was a mission to save her mom and Paul, to bring them back to Grisly alive.

  “Do you know where you’re going, Mr. Bonkers?” Justin asked from the back of the van.

  “Uhh, it’s Mr. Barker.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “He’s going the right way, Justin,” Brin said, looking back at the group of frightened passengers. “There’s only one way to Bodie from here.”

  “Yeah, uhh, so,” Ash said, squirming in his seat and still trying to make himself comfortable as he tried to find room next to Anaya. “Is it about that time we talk about what’s going to happen? You know, when we actually get to Bodie?”

  “I don’t know what you mean—”

  “Is that really our destination?” a hesitating voice asked from the back. Brin looked over Ash’s shoulder to see Dylan. “Of all the places we can go, of all the places we can escape to, you want to go back there, Brin?”

  “Droz has my mom, Dylan. If I don’t save her—if we don’t save her—she’ll be turned into one of them. And she’ll be gone… forever. I just lost my dad last year. I can’t lose my mom, too.”

  “I understand that,” Dylan said. “But let’s be honest here. Some of us have actually been to Bodie. It’s not safe there. It’s a war zone. And now that all those vampires know who we are, there’s no telling what they’ll do to us.” Brin had known Dylan Wickerman since freshman year at Grisly High, but she never took him to be an emotional person. Gay, sure, but not emotional. So when Dylan started crying, she was taken aback.

  “Dylan, it’s OK—”

  “It’s not OK,” he said. “I feel sympathy for your problem, I do. I don’t want anything to happen to your mom. But it’s not right to go in there and endanger all of us—potentially kill all of us—just to save one person.”

  “Well, we’d be saving Paul, too—”

  “Oh, come on, nobody gives a shit about him,” Dylan said, changing his demeanor from scared to spiteful. “Nobody has given a shit about that vampire from the start, except you. Just because you have some crush on the guy is not a reason to put all of our lives at risk!”

  “What do you expect me to do, Dylan?” Brin said, raising her voice. “Just have us all drive past Bodie? Let my mom go? Become a goddamn orphan?”

  “Of course not. I just don’t see why we all have to go, too. Mr. Barker said we needed to get out of Grisly. We needed to get away from those zombies, and the other vampires, and all those other monsters that were taking over our town.” He stopped and cleared his throat. Valerie looked back at the boy and he nodded. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” the troll said.

  “Anyway, we’ve gotten out of Grisly, and we’ve stayed together for the car ride all the way past Carson Valley. But now I think it’s important that each of us has a say in what happens next. I for one would rather slit my own throat than take another step back in Bodie. I’m not going back there, Brin. I won’t.”

  Brin glanced at Mr. Barker, then looked back at Dylan. She licked her lips and crossed her arms, not like she was cold, but like she was aggravated. “All right,” she said. “You’re right. Anaya made you go to Bodie once. But this time, I don’t want to be the person who makes you go back.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to save your mother, Brin. Please understand that. It’s just… I don’t think it’s safe. For any of us.”

  Brin looked at the others in the van. Her brother, her best friend, her once mortal enemy, and her new troll friend. She looked at Mr. Barker, then Dylan, then Dylan’s new boyfriend.

  “Does anyone else feel this way?” Brin asked. She looked at Ash first. “Ash?”

  “I’m with you, Brin. One hundred and fifty percent. I’m not letting you go back there alone.”

  “I agree,” Anaya said. She raised her hand up and let Ash high-five it. “Now’s not the time to be a coward. If your mom is there, if Paul is there, we’re going to save them. And you know what else I want to do as soon as we get back to that hellhole? I want to destroy the vampires. Each and every one of them. For trying to kill us last time, and for kidnapping your mom. But I also want to take them down… because… I hope you guys haven’t forgotten… they took Chace and Sawyer away from us, too.”

  “So you’re with me,” Brin said, trying not to cry.

  “I’m with you, Brin. I still think you’re a bitch. But you’re a damn fine righteous bitch.”

  Brin laughed and nodded her head. “Thanks, Anaya. You’ve really… you’ve become a good friend. You know that, right?”

  “Well I wouldn’t go that far,” Anaya said, but then laughed right along with Brin.

  “What about you?” Ash said to Valerie. “Do you want to stay back with Dylan? We can drop you guys off in Bridgeport, I guess. Before the point of no return.”

  “Yeah, you don’t have to go, Valerie,” Anaya said. “And I would never make you. But you are a troll. A big, scary troll. That could help in our favor.”

  “We’re going to look so bad-ass!” Ash said. “Valerie as a troll, and Mr. Barker as a werewolf, leading the way, as we charge in there and gut every last one of those blood-sucking freaks.”

  “Well, I don’t really know you guys, but I can’t imagine staying back and letting you all go in there by yourselves,” the new girl said. “I wouldn’t have gotten in this car if I didn’t believe we should stick together. I don’t care what happens. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying with you
guys.”

  Brin put her hand out and let Valerie wrap her palm over it. Brin bit down on her tongue, still reeling from all the hope and encouragement from (most of) the others in the van.

  She looked past Valerie, toward her brother, who was cramped in the back left of the vehicle. He had his shotgun pressed down against the floorboards.

  Justin glanced at the two boys beside him, then back at Brin. “Yeah, Brin, I’m sorry but… I kind of agree with Dylan.”

  “You what?”

  “Yeah, I mean, the more I think about it, even though I brought this gun along, I think it may be a war zone in there. It’s not sensible for all of us to go in there and get slaughtered just to save one person.”

  “But Justin,” Brin said, shocked at his response, “that one person is our mother!”

  He just shook his head. “I’m sorry, Brin. I can’t do it. I mean… don’t you know?”

  “No! Know what?” Her heart was racing. She wanted to strangle him.

  “We’re all going to die tonight.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Brin was ready to crawl to the back of the van and slap her only sibling.

  But then he smiled, crossed his arms, and shook his head, playfully, like he was three years old. “Just fooling you, sis,” the college student said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “What?” Brin said, her mouth wide open, horrified. “That was a joke? That wasn’t cool, Justin! Not cool!”

  “Brin, I’m not going to let you out of my sight. Where you go, I go. And I’m going to do what I’ve always done, ever since we were little kids: make sure you’re safe.”

  “No offense, dude,” Dylan said, “but you didn’t exactly keep Brin safe the first time we went to Bodie, or when our high school became infested with zombies. Where were you then, brother boy?”

  “Well, I couldn’t help her if I wasn’t there. I don’t understand your argument.”

  Dylan bit down on his tongue and crossed his arms, obviously upset he was the only one considering not re-entering the gates of horror for a second time. He looked at the front of the van to see Brin staring right back at him, telling him with her eyes, “we all have to stick together.”