Killercon Read online

  “Just don’t lie to me, that’s all.”

  I won’t. I wouldn’t. Why the hell do I need to work some bullshit job, anyway, with the money you make? All of that flashed through Bryan’s mind, but he said nothing, just stood silent in front of her, wondering what he could say to smooth it over.

  “Bryan, we need more money coming into this household. What you’re making off your writing isn’t cutting it. You know that.”

  Bryan took a deep breath, and blew it out. “Look,” he said. “We’ve just got to be patient.”

  “You look. We’ve been through this. I didn’t sign on for a lifetime of barely getting by. And that’s what it’s come down to: barely getting by. What’d your writing bring in last year, twenty-two thousand dollars?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Twenty-three, and you spent a good portion of that flying around the country partying with your goofy Internet buddies.”

  “Book signings, Carrie. They were book signings, promoting the product. And they’re not my Internet friends. They’re fellow writers who happen to be promoting books of their own... just like me. That’s how this business works. Books don’t just sell themselves, you know.”

  “Oh, please. That’s exactly what they do. They sit on a shelf and people wander through the store and buy them. If not, then you need to head on down to Books-A-Million with a cardboard sign that says: Bryan Kenney, writer extraordinaire, will write for food.”

  Bryan chuckled.

  “I mean it, Bryan. We’ve got to get more income flowing through—”

  From over Bryan’s shoulder came the snick-snack of a shotgun being pumped, drawing a roll of the eyes from Carrie. “—here.”

  Saved by the bell, he thought. Then he turned to his PC, sat down in a scuffed imitation leather office chair and stared at the Instant Messenger window. “Who’s this?

  Ah, Johnny Z!”

  “Ah, yes. Another intellectual giant.”

  Bryan snickered as he banged out wsup! on the keyboard, laughing when naked and hairy…hands on Sherry appeared beneath the message he’d just typed. Oh yeah? he answered, his fingers racing over the keyboard. Since when did you start calling your cock Sherry?

  LOL appeared in the text field.

  Carrie looked over his shoulder. “Perfect,” she said. “Young Einstein and Lou Costello.”

  She scooped up the paperback and placed it on a shelf in a three-foot-high pressboard bookcase that stood beside Bryan’s desk.

  “Aw,” Bryan groaned. “Look at this shit.”

  Turning, Carrie moved to his side and looked down at the tiny envelope in the blue taskbar running across the monitor, at the bold text in the From column of Bryan’s inbox that read: I AMME RED33.

  “Who’s that?”

  Bryan gave his head a disgusted shake. “Some moron. Thinks he’s a writer but can’t write worth a damn. Can barely string a halfway coherent sentence together.”

  “Why’s he emailing you?”

  A line of italicized question marks appeared in Bryan’s Instant Messenger screen.

  Bryan typed in BRB!

  Cya popped up under it.

  Bryan used his mouse to highlight Red33’s message, a couple of clicks and the text filled the screen.

  Hey Bryan,

  how come I haven’t heard back on those pages I sent ya? i’d think a little input would be the least you could do after all the edits I did on your stuff... *wink wink*… what’d ya think about em? pretty good stuff, huh?

  … when ya gonna post some more?

  peace out!

  “Edits?”

  Groaning, Bryan double-clicked the attachment and his word processor sprang to life. “Aw, Christ on crutches. Look at that. He’s sent me another pile of garbage.”

  He swiveled around in his chair, looked up at Carrie and said, “This guy.” He shook his head and a snort escaped his throat. “I posted the first two chapters of my new project at HorrorFan, you know, just so some folks could take a look, maybe generate a little interest for when it hits the bookstore. A good deal of people replied, mostly positive stuff, I might add. But this moron copies it into a Word document and sends me his own little”—Bryan made quotation marks in the air with his index and middle fingers—“edits. Which looked like something a three-year-old might’ve put together. Now he’s sending me his stories. Look at this shit.”

  “I take it he’s not one of your esteemed colleagues.”

  Bryan leaned back in his chair, waving a hand at the monitor. “Not hardly.”

  Carrie looked down, eyes poring over the document while Bryan did the same. Every once in a while he’d sigh, give his head a disgusted shake and scroll the page.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Carrie, he’s got lightning striking a tree and an acorn falling off and rolling into a pile of shit at the bottom of a sewage drain, and then the acorn sprouts arms and legs and feet and grows into a serial killing nut, for chrissakes, a nut hacking women to pieces. And look at this… ” Bryan tilted his head down, putting an open hand across his eyes as if shielding them against what came next. “He’s got the tree coming to life and strangling Nut Boy while he’s in the middle of strangling a little girl.”

  Carrie put a gentle hand on Bryan’s shoulder. “I seem to remember somebody writing a story about a tree that came to life and killed a little boy by stuffing seed pods down his throat.”

  “Oh, my, God.”

  “I know the writing is amateurish, but the idea’s not that bad. I mean, it’s wild and weird and could never happen in real life, but that’s what horror is.”

  Oh, great. The woman who was buying an Oprah book of the month when I met her is telling me what horror is!

  “Why don’t you just offer him a couple of suggestions and let that be the end of it? Could be another sale. Who knows, maybe he spreads the word about what a great guy you are and more people check you out.”

  “That’s the problem. It’s not going to be the end of it. I’ve been going back and forth with this guy for a month now. First it was a friendly little fan email with a polite: would you mind taking a look at the story I’ve had published over at DarkHarvest.com? I gave him a generic, good show, old boy, and a constructive comment or two. Now I’ve got him sending me some half-assed piece of tripe every other week. I don’t have time to tutor some wannabe who ain’t never gonna be.”

  “Time? You’ve all the time in the world to sit around staring at that monitor all day.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Time enough to type out messages to those Internet pals of yours.”

  “I don’t spend half the day chatting with anybody. My time is spent working on the craft.”

  “Oh, right. The craft. Why don’t you show me how much craft the great Bryan Kenney generated today?”

  Bryan held up his hands, palms flattened in front of him, feigning disbelief that she would even think about questioning his work ethic. But he said nothing, because he’d been so proud of a passage he’d come up with last night that he’d shown it to her, and one look was all it would take to see that he hadn’t written a single word since.

  “Yeah, just what I thought: another lie.”

  “Goddamnit, would you give me a break here?” Bryan said, raising his voice to try and throw her off balance. Then, much softer, “Look, I’ll see about that application in the morning.”

  “Well, you’d better. You’d better drag your ass down there tomorrow and somewhere else the next day. I’m not marching off to work every morning so you can sit around all day working on your craft.”

  “Geez, Carrie,” Bryan said, looking over his shoulder just in time to see her cross the room, and then disappear into the hallway.

  Chapter Three

  Bryan turned back to the computer, thinking, Where did I go wrong?

  Carrie had been a gift from the gods, a beautiful woman who had shown up at Barnes and Noble, picked up a copy of Cold Cuts and held it out for Bryan to scr
awl his signature across the inside page. Not because she enjoyed his work, (he found out later) but because he was cute.

  It was a short courtship; a couple of drinks, a couple of dates and they fell quickly in love. And why not? The registered nurse was beautiful. She had a nice house in a fairly upscale neighborhood. Her duties onboard a trauma helicopter earned her a handsome wage, and she had even given Bryan a gruesome idea or two that he’d included in one of his twisted plots. She seemed infatuated with the author, genuinely impressed that he could make a living from his writing, and even more impressed when he showed her the fan mail and the countless message board entries praising his work. And they both loved the way her naked body felt draped across his five-foot-ten-inch frame. Bryan thought he’d hit the jackpot, left high and dry by a miserable ball-busting bitch, only to have a perfect angel happen along to pull him out of his doldrums so they could start a brand new life together.

  Unfortunately for Bryan, though, the novelty of being hooked up with someone making a grab for his fifteen minutes of fame wore thin once she found out how little money he actually garnered from his chosen profession. And Bryan’s newfound mantra of ‘be patient’ hadn’t helped matters, either.

  She, like most people, had thought seeing his face displayed on the back of a novel meant that he must be doing pretty well for himself. But Bryan knew better. And now with their first wedding anniversary on the horizon, Carrie too knew the reality of the situation. That only a handful of elite and well publicized authors make enough money from their craft to live comfortably. The rest are human hamsters in carpeted twelve-by-sixteen foot cages, running in place on spinning wheels of broken promises, fueled by impossible dreams and unrealistic expectations.

  Bryan leaned forward to type a line of text into his Instant Messenger screen to alert Johnny Z that he was back.

  Moments later, bout time appeared on his screen.

  Then: how’s goes it with Sling?

  Bryan replied that he was chugging along pretty well, but had been too preoccupied to get much accomplished today. (Actually, he’d fired up a joint at lunchtime instead of his word processor, and had spent most of the day watching DVD’s and surfing the Web.) Then he forwarded the email he had received from Red33 to Johnny Z.

  Another line of text appeared: happens to the best of us, man…

  it’s cool, Bryan typed. will make it up tomorrow…how bout you? contract come yet?

  hell no, came the reply. spent all day lookin for it, too…ah well, watched pot and all that, i suppose.

  Bryan laughed, his fingers tapping the keyboard as he remembered how jittery he’d been waiting for that first contract from Harrow House… quit watching, start a new project! he typed.

  A moment later, easy for you to say, mr. veteran horror writer! came back.

  Ha, Bryan typed, smiling, because even though John Zweitic may have thought of him that way, Bryan knew he was still just a babe in the woods, staggering blindly down a dark and slippery trail, hoping like hell he didn’t fall by the wayside.

  i was hoping to hear from somebody at Harrow.

  Bryan smiled.

  you ‘did’ tell them about me, didn’t you?

  Johnny Z seemed like a good guy, and the story he had sent Bryan seemed up to snuff, but Bryan wasn’t about to stick his neck out by vouching for the guy. After all, nobody had gone to bat for Bryan. His manuscript had clawed its way up from the bottom of the slush pile. The story sells itself. It’s as simple as that. If you’re good, you’ll get there.

  But why rub it in?

  He answered that he had.

  cool, bro--you all set for the big bad Con?

  Bryan, absentmindedly shrugging his shoulders, answered: might be kinda tuff, money’s a little tight…

  To which Johnny Z replied: Dude!!!! are you kiddin’ me? you gotta go! it’s gonna be a killer con… everybody’s gonna be there…keene, crabtree, huntley…Zweitic :o) not to mention damn near every publishing house from Bantam on down to Harrow…you’d be crazy not to go…besides, you owe me a goddamn beer :o)

  Bryan knew he was right. He did have to go. It would be foolish of him not to attend. Not only that, it was being held on Halloween weekend. He’d made important contacts at past conventions. No telling what he might miss out on if he stayed away from this one. He’d just have to figure out a way to squeeze it past Carrie.

  what’s this… Apparently, Johnny Z had just received Red33’s email.

  Then: holy smokes! is he serious?

  evidently, Bryan began, i’ve got a new editor… and looks like my new “editor” expects me to teach him how to write…

  cocky little shit, isn’t he :o)… appeared on Bryan’s messenger screen.

  Then: Christ… this looks like my first story!

  Bryan, chuckling, went on to provide Johnny Z with the details he had given Carrie earlier—many of which Zweitic was already familiar, some of which he was not. He told him how Carrie had suggested he offer Red33 some constructive pointers, how he had already gone that route and how the guy seemed to be the equivalent of Uncle Remus’ Tar Baby from the Brer Rabbit stories of Bryan’s youth; one touch and he’s stuck to you forever.

  Johnny Z typed out a response full of caustic one-line put-downs directed at the novice writer who seemed unable to accept no for an answer. He advised Bryan that maybe the only way to be rid of him was to accept Carrie’s suggestion, but to give Red33 a scathing, no holds barred opinion of what he really thought about his writing. Take a few of his amateurish turns of phrase and rearrange them into the crisp and crackling prose of a seasoned professional that would leave Red33’s head spinning.

  Later, after they had eaten their dinner, after Bryan and Carrie had watched the movie Carrie had picked up and Bryan had polished off a few beers, that’s exactly what Bryan did.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, Bryan scrambled some eggs, buttered some warm slices of toast. The microwave dinged and he opened the glass door. Utilizing a potholder, he lifted a bowl of steaming hot grits from the microwave. He wore a pair of cut-off blue jeans and a faded Black Sabbath t-shirt, hair uncombed and slightly unkempt; a sprig on the back of his scalp pointing toward the ceiling as Carrie came into the kitchen and gave him a peck on the cheek, tousled his hair, and said, “Smells wonderful, Alfalfa.” Her blonde hair, still damp from the shower, had the faint smell of peach blossoms. Small, dark splotches seemed to be blooming in several areas of her light blue hospital scrubs, as if she had thrown them on without drying herself properly.

  Bryan laughed, hugged her and said, “You smell wonderful.”

  Then he stirred the grits, and he and Carrie portioned out their food and carried their plates and glasses of orange juice to the dining room table. It was seven-fifteen by the time they’d eaten. Carrie hopped out of her chair and gave Bryan another kiss on the cheek. Then she gathered up her purse and headed for the door.

  On the porch, she turned to Bryan—who had followed her across the living room—and said, “You’re going to do what we talked about?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bryan?”

  “I promise.”

  She stepped close to him and tipped back her head. Eyes sparkling in the morning sun, she kissed him. Then, looking into his eyes, she said, “I love you, Bryan.”

  “I love you, too,” he said, not because he thought it was expected of him, but because he really did.

  And then she was down the stairs, her blonde hair bouncing against her shoulders as Bryan followed to where the newspaper lay in a plastic sleeve in the yard, bending to pick it up as Carrie made her way to the black SUV parked in the crushed-shell driveway, jumped inside and backed onto the road, waving an arm out the window as she headed up West Carrolton Way.

  Bryan carried the newspaper to the end of the driveway, to the tan Honda that was parked at the curb; ten years old but as steady and dependable as the old Singer sewing machine his mother still used back in Arkansas. Except for the fla
t tire, the car was virtually unblemished, no dents or dings; even the paint job had held up well. That damned tire. If only he had looked out the window yesterday, he would’ve noticed the slight listing toward the road. He could have run out and swapped it with the spare, hauled ass and had the tire patched. Could have saved himself a lot of grief, that was for sure. Could have spent today working on his manuscript instead of applying for some dead-end warehouse job he wasn’t about to accept. Now he was stuck going through the motions just to appease his wife.

  Carrie. Aw, hell. Maybe she was right. It wasn’t like New York was beating a path to his door for his next novel. Hell, it wasn’t even a certainty it would be published, not with the way the industry seemed to be going these days. Maybe he should take a job, just not this job, one he was so overqualified for he would end up hating it, until he ended up hating Carrie for pushing him into it.

  Bryan made up his mind that he would go across town, dutifully apply for the position, and in the interview he would simply tell whomever the truth: that he was a writer of extreme horror fiction looking for a few bucks to tide him over between royalty checks. Nobody in their right mind would offer him a job after that.

  Unless they were a fan. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass? Then what? Pull his pocketknife and gouge out an eyeball? Hmm, Bryan thought as he turned and made his way across the yard. Not bad. He might just have to work that little nugget into Sling. Its central theme is of a man slowly unraveling after a layoff forces him into begging for jobs he’s way too qualified for.

  Chapter Five

  On the couch in the living room, Bryan slid the newspaper free from its wrapping, scanning front page headlines as the clear plastic sleeve dropped to the carpet. Nothing in the Charlotte Observer really caught his interest, until he turned to page three and saw a small article about a woman’s decapitated body that had been found in a house up in Asheboro. He picked up the remote control, clicked it and navigated his way to the AMC morning movie—Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.