-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 V 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 bangs 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 said, “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 mornings. 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 am.
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 JC Penny. 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 was 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 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 try to stand, 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 started 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 unwrapped 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 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.
It put a small smile on Gavin’s face. He could feel it, but the fact that it was a smile—given the circumstances—made him angry. He ground his teeth together and pushed.
-4-
Gavin tottered over to where Mom sat. Her eyes were alert, but they always were. They watched him approach with unfiltered anger. More like hate.
It had become hate, born of resentment and disappointment. He knew that but tried to build layers of personal misdirection over it. She’d had a hard life. Five kids. No chance at a job until the last one, Jimmy, was in school, and by then she was in her forties. Always jostling for crappy jobs with kids not much older than her oldest. Twenty-something managers at temp jobs who really didn’t give a crap about her or anything. Dead minds overseeing numb employees in a nowhere job. The economy kept tanking, and then all that political stuff. More wars killing young men and women from town who went to serve and came home in boxes. Or, if they lived, came home damaged in body or soul. More diseases to be afraid of. Mom used to joke that her life was as frustrating and complicated as George Bailey’s in It’s a Wonderful Life, except that there were no adorable guardian angels and no heartwarming third act where everyone who was a pain in the ass came to save her.
Gavin could see echoes of all of that in Mom’s eyes. Even now.
He raised the ring and showed it to her, angling it to catch the glow of the house lights.
“Look what I found under the seat,” he said.
Mom said nothing. She glared.
He sighed.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said.
Nothing.
Gavin took a half step toward her and she bared her teeth. Or, tried to. The gag didn’t really allow that. She tried to reach for him, but her thin wrists were snugged tight to the armrests by turn after turn of duct tape. Her ankles were similarly bound, and more of the tape held her torso to the chair-back and crisscrossed her body. He’d found pink duct tape. For her. For Mom.
Her fingers were free, though, and they flexed and twitched and clawed at the armrest. It took Gavin nearly five whole minutes to capture one of those desperate fingers, clumsy the ring onto the proper finger, and snug it in place. She was not at all cooperative. She thrashed and cried out and stabbed him with those hateful stares.
He sagged back, sweaty, gasping.
Crying.
He looked down the row to where Gavin’s youngest brother and sister—Jimmy and Allison—sat, with Aunt Joan next to them. Uncle Pete was next to her, and their twins—Abby and Deedee—at the far end of the row. Gavin had not yet caught up with the rest of the family. His other two sisters, Connie and Gail, and all the various and assorted cousins, nephews and nieces. There were a lot of Funkes in San Diego County. It was a Funkey place, his dad used to say. This was all he had now. Each of them tied there. Each of them his guests, however unwilling, for his nightly movie marathons. Each of them trying to break free and escape. Each of them wild with hatred.
Gavin turned away and sat on the step beside her row, put his face in his hands, and wept again. Not as hard this time, but longer. The minutes crawled over him like ants.
-5-
As soon as he trusted his legs to carry him, he got up and staggered out of the theater and stood in the concrete yard out back. The big dumpster was near to overflowing and he could hear rats moving inside of it. He heard them crunching on discarded popcorn. They were movie-house rats, though, and he didn’t mind. If they ever snuck in, though, he’d catch them and then they’d be sorry.
It was a bright day and the sun seemed nailed to the blue sky. He had plenty of time before he had to be back at work. Gavin walked around the dumpster to where his big white commercial van waited for him. It was gassed up because he always did that before he came home. And, because he was anal and was okay with it, he opened the back doors and made sure he had everything he needed. On the left-hand wall was a pegboard covered in hooks from which his many rolls of duct tape were hung. Below those were knives, clubs, brass knuckles, hatchets, a sledgehammer, bone saws, a scythe, a fire axe, coils of rope, and several canvas hoods with Velcro neck bands. On the right-hand side were sturdier hooks and some eyebolts, along with a huge bundle of plastic zip-ties for restraining wrists and ankles. There were boxes of big black industrial trash bags, a stack of rubber body bags, and a pile of precisely cut pieces of cloth and leather belts. He always wrapped the leather belts in T-shirt cotton because he was mindful of comfort. Gags did not have to be nasty.
He also had a wheelbarrow and a decent hand-truck, both of which were fitted out with bungee cords. He’d learned from experience on that. As he had with all of it. Everything was a work in progress for Gavin. But he was smart and patient and diligent and focused.
The last thing he checked was his toolbox. It was a big red Craftsman, stocked with excellent tools for any task. Drills, hammers … all of it.
He closed the doors, patted them for luck, got behind the wheel, used the remote to open the gates, and drove out. Being careful. Always careful. Last thing he wanted to do was get caught.
The city was always quiet on Sunday mornings. He saw some people, but even though they looked at the big white van he just kept going. He didn’t know any of them, and he had no interest in inviting total strangers to one of his marathons. He had a big one planned for Wednesday. Wacky Wednesday, as he thought of it. Always a hodgepodge of movies. He had a totally eclectic blend in mind. Start off with trailers and a bunch of cartoons. Even the cartoons were a blend—old Woody Woodpecker, an episode of Lippy the Lion and Hard-de-Har-Har; then a Porky Pig one, some Disney stuff, and wrap it up with one of the earliest Popeye shorts he could find. It was a good thing his theater had been renovated a few years ago to show high-definition Blu-ray DVDs instead of actual film. There were two big multi-disc banks. That was great for archived funnies and old trailers. But the real heart of his projection room was the digital streaming capabilities. He had thousands of hours of movies on an Apple MacBook Pro networked to an eight-terabyte external drive. Plus, software that would keep the movies playing endlessly until he turned it off. Gavin could play movies until the cows came home.
After the trailers and cartoons, he’d start soft, with kind of a retrospective of cinema history. First up was a digitally remastered and ultra clean version of The Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplain’s masterpiece. After that he’d jump to an early Marx Brothers flick, then on to Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. From there it was John Wayne in She Tied a Yellow Ribbon, and the Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds classic, Singing in the Rain. He had a lot of variety after that. Comedies by Mel Brooks, one of Orson Welles’s lesser-known pieces, a John Houston adventure, and on to William Friedkin, and so on. The marathon would be an education as well as a celebration. The monster movies wouldn’t start until sunset, and would again go silent with 1927’s Nosferatu, through some of the Universal and RKO catalog, onto the Hammer flicks, more of the George Romero oeuvre, and through the darkest hours of the night. He had Silence of the Lambs inserted in the block of horror rather than mystery because Gavin considered it a horror film and could go toe-to-toe with any film history snob who argued otherwise.
He smiled to himself, and his heart thumped happily as he thought about the marathon. It was going to be the last word in such showcases of cinematic artistry.
Gavin put in his earbuds, turned up the music—Adele this time—and went about his business.
-6-
Gavin drove up Route 5 to the Shell station in Carlsbad. The day before he’d rigged a small generator to power an electric siphon. He checked to make sure no one was around, then got out of the van and went over to view the gauge on the single-tank truck. The needle was buried in the green and the generator was silent, its automatic shut off triggered by the anti-spillover float in the tanker. He climbed up onto the truck and double-checked with the big stick he’d set there for that purpose. The whole tank was filled to capacity. Three thousand gallons.
Smiling, he climbed down and uncoupled the vapor and fuel hoses. He went over the whole truck to make sure every setting and fitting was correct, then climbed in and drove it back to the theater, waited until the street was clear, opened the gate, and backed it in.
He took his mom’s old Honda back to his van. She wouldn’t need it again, so he left the keys in it and got back into his old vehicle.
It didn’t take long to get to Solana Beach, where his two sisters lived in a beach cottage. Connie owned it and rented a room to Gail. They called the place Party Central, and it was indeed that. A steady stream of buff surfers or bearded hipsters. The kinds of parties Gavin would never have been invited to. The kind he only ever saw when he peeked through windows. Connie was the most promiscuous, but Gail was hardly a nun.
He spent an hour looking for them. They were not at home. Not at the Starbucks down the block. Not in the taco bar on the beach. They were nowhere. It saddened him. He was hoping they could join the movie marathon. He wanted the whole family there. He sat in his van and stared at their cottage, feeling the loss of them. Connie and Gail were always a bit silly. Flighty, Mom often said. But he loved them. They both seemed to find something funny in any situation. They even shared some giggles behind their hands at Dad’s funeral, which had made that afternoon somehow bearable.
“Damn,” he murmured. The pain and weariness in the sound of his own voice hit him like punches. Not jabs, but deep blows to the chest and stomach. Fresh tears tried to burn their way out of the corners of his eyes, but he pawed them away. He didn’t want to cry again. Gavin was afraid he might not stop this time.
He realized that it was Gail more than Connie that did this to him. She was the baby. She was the one who seemed to be filled with life and sunshine. As a little girl she was always smiling. At everything. A falling leaf, a snoring dog, a hummingbird. She wasn’t beautiful but she’d always been pretty. Gavin understood the difference. People didn’t necessarily fall in love with her, but everyone wanted to be around her. Strangers wanted to know her. You felt good when Gail was around, and when she laughed then everyone laughed. Even the real sticks-up-their-butts types had to smile. Gail was always alive. Gail was life.
If she was gone—then there was always going to be a Gail-shaped hole in the world through which sunshine and happiness and optimism would be slowly sucked away.
He sat there for a long time. Hands locked around the steering wheel. Fingers constricting tight on the knobbed leather. Eyes burning as he stared and tried not to cry.
Gavin sat there for a long, long time.
And Gail was not there.
-7-
Until she was.
-8-
It took a lot for Gavin to drive back to the theater.
Too much effort.
Too much pain.
Too much time.
The sun had somehow rolled across the table of the sky and then tumbled off behind a wall of twilight clouds. There were shadows seeping out from under every car, and leaning out from the sides of homes and stores. The streetlights did not push back against this tide of darkness because they had lost that fight more than a year ago. Instead, they stood in a silent vigil as the day burned down like a dropped match.
Gavin knew that he’d lost time. Hours.
It was like that sometimes, but never as bad as this. No. Not even with Mom.
Gail, though.
As his mental circuits came back online with great reluctance, he turned to look behind him, into the bay of the van. With the doors closed everything back there was muted to vague shapes.
He could see Gail, though.
He could hear her.
She was strapped to the hand-truck by a dozen bungee cords. Her wrists and ankles were secured with duct tape. Not pink. He hadn’t been able to think things through enough for that. When he saw her simply walk up to his van, Gavin lost most coherent thought. He’d managed to grab her, though. To wrestle her down to the ground, put the hood over her, tie her up, attach her to the hand-truck, and get her into the van. The hand-truck was locked in place against one wall, held by industrial metal clips. It wouldn’t fall over. He didn’t want Gail to get hurt.
All of that had been done, but it must have been sheer autopilot because Gavin could not remember any of it. Not one bit. There was nothing in his head from the moment he and Gail locked eyes through the windshield of the van and now, waking up out of whatever it was. A fugue? Maybe. He thought that was the word. Even now he wasn’t entirely back to himself. Not even close.
He was almost all the way back to the theater before he realized that he was hurt.
Gavin slowed and stopped for a moment in the middle of a side street and looked down at his hand. It was covered with dried blood. Not actively bleeding, though, which was something. But Gail must have fought. They always fought. Even family. Or maybe especially family. Aunt Joan had really put up a fight. So did Mom.
He hadn’t expected it from Gail, though. Not her. Not sunshine and smiles Gail.
He flexed his hand. It hurt, but everything seemed to be working. The bite wasn’t bad, and it hadn’t bled that much. No major arteries cut. Or maybe there were no arteries in the hand. He wasn’t sure. But the bones weren’t broken, and the muscles didn’t seem to be damaged.
So, Gail had fought back, had gotten him—probably when he was trying to get the gag on. He had to accept that the smiling, laughing mouth had turned savage in defense. Maybe in his fugue state he hadn’t been able to reach her, to explain what he wanted from her. Maybe he’d been so messed up that he forgot to tell her that Mom was there, and Aunt Joan, and the others.
“Damn, Gail …” he said, and heard the whine in his voice. Like how he used to say that when she played a prank on him when they were little. Before her smile made him smile back.
The sun was almost down now. He should have started tonight’s movies already.
But he lingered a moment, resting his forehead on the steering wheel. She’d bitten him. Gail had bitten him.
It was so unfair. So wrong.
She’d never once been mean to him her whole life.
The bite, though.
That was very mean.
“That wasn’t very nice, you know,” he said, and the words rose to a shout.
Gail thrashed and howled and definitely would have done worse to him if she could.
“No,” he said as he lifted his foot from the brake and pressed on the gas, “that wasn’t very nice at all.”
He drove the rest of the way to the theater, feeling the hurt burn through him, like acid in his veins.
That wasn’t very nice at all.
-9-
He parked in back and had one hell of a time getting the hand-truck down from the van. His hand was hurting now, and it was starting to throb.
Crap.
He nearly dropped her, and it would have served her right for what she did. But Gavin was quick and caught the handle of the hand-truck just in time, steadied it, and saved the day. Then he wheeled her inside.
There was some real drama getting her into a good seat. Gail was a lot younger than either Mom or Aunt Joan, and even though she lived like a slacker, she had surfer muscles. Gail fought him every step of the way. He tried to reason with her but gave it up and saved his breath for the task of getting her from the hand-truck to the seat. It took forty minutes and about a gallon of sweat.
Then he staggered over to an empty seat and collapsed into it. He was aware that every eye in the place was on him. Including Gail, now that the hood was off. Those big blue eyes. Even the spray of sun freckles across her nose and cheeks looked somehow angry, despite how pale she was. Her suntan was faded to a pale yellow.
“Not exactly a bronze sun bunny, are you?” he yelled, then felt immediately ashamed of himself. That was unkind. She couldn’t help that. Not anymore.
None of them could. Mom was so pale she looked gray. Or … maybe was gray. The house lights in the theater were too weak to show clearly. Aunt Joan looked positively jaundiced. The rest were a mix of milk white, ash gray, pee yellow.
Gavin looked down at his hand. Wrestling with Gail had opened the wound and it bled sluggishly. He lifted his arm and angled it into the spill of light. The blood wasn’t exactly red. Too dark, and too thick. Brick-red at best.
Even though he knew what Gail was—what she had to be—it was a shock.
Or maybe it was the last thread holding up his denial. His hope.
He looked around the theater. There were eleven members of his nuclear and extended family here. And about thirty other people. His favorite teacher from the eighth grade. His neighbors—the nice Muslim couple from upstairs who were always sweet to him. The two guys from the game store. The cute girl who ran the concession stand in this very theater. Others. The people who mattered to him. The people who filled his world. All of them seated in chairs. Held in place. As comfortable as he could make them.
But …
Not all of them.
Connie wasn’t here. Some of his favorite cousins weren’t here. His niece, Emma, wasn’t here. He missed her a lot. So tiny. Seven weeks old when this all happened. There wasn’t enough of her left to bring to the theater. Not after Aunt Joan had …
Well.
He’d hoped to find more of the family.
To keep him company. And for the marathon.
The marathon.
Damn.
He looked at his hand. There were small black lines radiating out from the bite. At first, he thought it was just lines of dried blood, but now he knew. Gavin fished around inside his own feelings, looking for evidence of the change. It was there.
A small thing, but there. His hands and feet were cold, and he was never cold. He rarely even slept with blankets. But they were like ice.
Is that how it would be? Just getting colder and colder until there was no warmth left in him? He hoped not. This was sunny San Diego and people came here because it was warm all year round. Not really hot, just nice. Gavin didn’t want to be cold forever.
He got up and stood there, swaying a little, feeling sad and lost.
Everyone looked at him.
He saw the same hunger in their eyes that was always there. But now, for the first time, he thought he understood it. A little.
Gail tried to snap at the air between them, but the gag didn’t permit it. Would she chew through it eventually? Mom did that once. She even ate part of the leather. It was cow, after all. Maybe they’d all have a last meal together. Leather. Cotton, too, but so what?
An ache opened up in his stomach. That was the best way to describe it. Opened. As if his whole body was a mouth. He thought about the popcorn and the Milk Duds. No. He didn’t really want those anymore. Maybe not even the beef jerky.
He knew what was happening. Gavin understood what he was getting hungry for. It was happening so fast, though. Or … was it fast? How long had it really been since Gail bit him? Hours. He closed his eyes and in the darkness behind his lids he saw his veins drain of their redness and go dark. His face was starting to get cold, too.
He felt two tears break and roll down his cheeks, but when he wiped them away and looked at his hand, he saw red-black smears.
The hunger was getting bigger. It was becoming insistent.
Gavin looked at his family and friends.
“I’ve got some stuff to do,” he said thickly. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He turned and hurried out, and he only fell twice.
-10-
It was dark out, so he turned on the exterior lights. He rarely did that because it drew other hungry people. That didn’t matter anymore, though.
Gavin worked as fast as he could, attaching the hoses from the tanker truck to the line of generators he’d networked together. They chugged and hummed and poured electricity into the cables that ran like snakes across the ground and into the back of the theater. A lot of power to operate the industrial projector. He tested the system and checked the redundancies. Everything was working perfectly, and he managed a smile. Or, thought it was a smile. It felt weird, though, and his teeth clacked together.
As if biting.
That frightened him, so he hurried. His fingers were so cold, and his feet were blocks of ice. Walking was getting hard because the cold was in his knees and hips now. It hurt, too. All his joints did.
Gavin set up the laptop in the projection room, opened the master file and started the software running. Then he peered out at the house, saw the screen display appear, announcing a few trailers. Another smile. Another clack.
“Hurry,” he told himself, but the word didn’t sound like a word. Just a sound. A moan.
He double and triple checked everything, then he dimmed the house lights and shambled down to the theater. He picked up one of the big rolls of duct tape. Blue. Nice. His favorite color.
Gavin shuffled sideways along the row and sat down in the empty seat next to Mom. She stared at him but now her eyes were different. No hate anymore. It startled him and he looked around. Everyone was studying him. No one was glaring. No one was thrashing as if trying to lunge at him. No one was trying to bite.
They just looked at him.
He stood there, watching them watch him.
“Mom …?” he said tentatively.
There was no reaction. At least nothing like what she’d done every other time since she had died and he brought her here. He raised his hand—the one with the bite—and held it close to her nose. She sniffed at it. And that was all. No anger anymore. No hostility. Sniffing his hand as if sniffing his newest cologne, or a bunch of flowers he brought her on Mother’s Day.
Something else opened in his chest. Not a hungry mouth this time, but something beautiful. She was Mom again. Okay, not really, but as much Mom as she could be. More than he ever expected her to be.
Gavin bent and kissed her cheek. Not even a flinch.
The coldness was growing inside of him, and despite the lovely glow inside he knew that the hunger was going to take him soon. It would make him want to go outside looking for something to eat.
“No,” he said, forcing him to shape that word. To make it sound like a real world and not a moan.
Gavin sat down. It took so much of what he had left to peel off strips of the duct tape. So much to bind his ankles together. So much more to wrap it around and around his stomach and chest and the back of the theater seat. He looped zip-ties around each wrist and bent to use his teeth to pull them snugly. The left was a little too tight, but he knew that soon it wouldn’t matter.
On the screen the trailers ended and the cartoons began.
He made it all the way through them. He thought he even laughed once or twice. But he wasn’t really sure. The rest of the family and friends sat with him. They were all watching. The last time he looked around he saw that they were staring at the screen. Entranced by the people moving there. By Charlie Chaplin.
Gavin settled back to watch the movie marathon.
It played for hours.
For days.
For weeks.
As far as Gavin and his family were concerned, it played forever.