Read Online The Late Night Horror Show by Bryan Smith - Free Book Online Page A

Punches and kicks she understood. They were how you fought and defended yourself against bad guys. Unless they were armed, which this guy wasn’t. But this was something else altogether. This was assault with murderous intent. The tire iron connected with devastating force, cracking the man’s skull and sending him toppling to the asphalt. Jason then fell atop him and shifted his grip on the tire iron before raising it high above his head.
    It came down again.
    And again.
    The sound of cracking bone was sickening. He was pulverizing the poor bastard’s skull. It freaked her out. She was witnessing a murder. She wasn’t a stranger to violence, but this shit was on a level beyond anything in her experience.
    Except…was it really murder?
    Jason got to his feet again, rounding on Brix with eyes wide from adrenaline. “The fuck is up with you?”
    Brix was embarrassed by how ineptly she had handled the situation. She covered this by reacting with hostility of her own. “The fuck’s up with me? The fuck’s up with you ? I didn’t need to be rescued by your sorry ass.”
    “Didn’t look that way to me.”
    Brix fumed. She curled her hands into tight fists. “I would’ve handled it.”
    “Right. Whatever. Looked to me like you were about to be zombie dinner.”
    Zombie.
    So there it was. The word some reflexive part of her subconscious hadn’t allowed her to acknowledge until now. Maybe because doing so meant being forced to acknowledge something far more disturbing. More disturbing even than the possibility of having stumbled into a government experiment with teleportation technology. Not just more disturbing, but far weirder. She couldn’t begin to fathom how it had happened, but she could no longer deny it—reality itself had been inverted.
    Or this was some kind of different version of reality altogether.
    A world where…
    Her shoulders sagged and her hard expression melted away. “Fuck.”
    She shook her head and turned away from Jason to stare at the darkened movie theater. A theater that, in this world, had never played host to a festival of cheap horror flicks. It was a boarded-up, abandoned wreck of a place. Just one more dead thing in a dying world. She stood still and let it all fully register. The smells. The fires in the distance. Rubbish and (probably) piles of bodies burning. Other hints of death and decay. And there were more groans out there. More hungry groans. She could see more shadowy figures shuffling toward them. A dozen. Two dozen. Maybe many more.
    She laughed, but it was a bitter sound. A hopeless sound. “Fuck. Fuck. ”
    Trevor tentatively touched her shoulder. “Brix? What is it?”
    She turned to look at him. She glanced at Jason. Nikki was beside him now and his arm was around her slender shoulders. His look of wired hostility was gone. She acknowledged this with a terse nod, knowing somehow that he understood what she knew as well.
    She shook her head. “This is so fucked. So many years of fantasizing about this shit and here it is. Goddamn.”
    Trevor frowned. “What are you saying?”
    Brix’s expression sobered as she again looked directly at the guy she loved. The guy she would now have to fight tooth and nail to protect if they were to have any hope of survival. “We’re in the movie, baby. We’re in fucking Rise of the Dead .”

Chapter Eight
    The first thing Lashon Miller was aware of was being wet all over. Droplets of rain pattered her face. She opened her eyes and saw a night sky filled with huge, dark clouds. A flash of lightning followed an ominous rumble of thunder. She dimly recalled checking the forecast before heading out for the evening. There had been no suggestion of thunderstorms. It was supposed to have been a clear, warm night. Instead, she was soaked and shivering. Other odd things penetrated as her head cleared and she became more aware of the world around her.
    Things such as the odd abundance of tall trees everywhere she looked.
    Lashon sat up and