super psycho future killers Read online

  super

  psycho

  future

  killers

  not a time travel story

  by Daryl Banner

  Copyright © 2012 by Daryl Banner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, groups, organizations, businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  it takes destroying yourself

  to realize how perfectly the pieces of you fit back together

  to realize how important it is to fail

  to realize that sometimes

  self-destructing

  can be an act of survival

  0:00:05

  A twist of my wrist tells me I have five minutes left.

  The earth moves again.

  I lose my balance, stumbling into the wall. I brace myself on the railing of the stairs, the nasty rusty railing I’ve always hated to touch. I can’t tell left from right, but I think I may be drunk. Except I haven’t had a drink, so maybe the other explanation is that the entire room, the entire building just shifted to the right, or left.

  But what would cause an entire building to move?

  This isn’t an earthquake because we don’t get them in this part of the country, but you kinda have to wonder, like, maybe you were wrong your whole life.

  I reach the door at the end of the stairs and shove it open like someone else’s life depends on it, stumble into the steaming hot hallway, and my eyes are blinded.

  Fire. Fire never looked so beautiful. Fire never looked so white. Nightmares couldn’t duplicate the scene before us. I’m almost ...

  I’m almost impressed.

  “Mica? Mica, you still behind me?” I call out.

  You know something’s wrong when the place you’re running towards for safety is a movie theater lobby swallowed in flames.

  “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” she says for an answer.

  The earth moves again.

  To the left I go, or right, and suddenly we’re flat against the wall. It’s sorta like the world’s a ship, this entire movie theater is being thrust over tidal waves in the middle of Hurricane Celeste.

  Really what I’m trying to say is, next time you’re buying a ticket at your local movie theater, remember this:

  Behind every kind smile is a killer.

  Welcome to the Garden Cinema 8, how may I help you?

  “Keep going,” she urges me from behind. “Keep moving, keep moving, we have to get out, quickly!”

  “I know, I know,” I moan, taking a very shaky first step forward, as if there’s any way someone can feel confident in a situation like this.

  My wrist says four minutes left.

  What I’m trying to say is, when you’re thanked and told to have a nice day, remember this: It could be the last time you’re thanked for anything. And it’s so easy to trust a smile at a window, isn’t it? Easy, and maybe deadly.

  Miss Mica and I dodge a chunk of ceiling that falls. The building falling in on us, piece by ugly piece, anyone who knows me wouldn’t be surprised that my first thought is, who the hell’s gonna clean all this up?

  “Move it, move it,” Mica keeps saying. “We’re running out of time.”

  She’s gripping my arm so tight my thumb tingles, I say, “I know.”

  All those years of pushups, all those years of classrooms, all those years of making friends, making money, all that Time. It’s our most precious natural resource and it’s all run out.

  Remember to smile sweetheart, everyone’s watching.

  This isn’t meant to be a public service announcement, but there’s millions of these smiles out there scooping popcorn into bags for you, wiping a chair down before your ass goes in it, selling you a ticket, have a nice day, have a nice day, have a nice day. All of them wondering when their life’s gonna begin. They wondered it when they were eighteen, they wonder it when they’re fifty.

  Then time runs out.

  “Look, Harper... The lobby!”

  Waving a hand through the air, as if that’ll get the smoke out of my way, I try to focus my eyes across the white-hot inferno of broken-tile, not sure what I’m supposed to look at, not sure what I’m seeing.

  Each of those pretty hard-working well-meaning teeth-tight smiles is a time-sensitive handle-with-care package that ticks, ticks, ticks. This seemingly happy face is begging you. Look me in the eye. Thank me. Don’t ask me stupid questions. Don’t be a dick.

  Instead, all you get is: Thank you, have a nice day.

  “Machnik,” she calls out.

  I turn and see him standing there in a total daze on the other side of the hallway, staring at the lobby like he’s seen heaven.

  “Machnik!” she calls out again, “Get out of here! Go!”

  But the bug-eyed curly-haired techno geek Machnik is drawn to the glory and fury of the lobby like a snake that’s caught him in the eye. All the floor tiles, they’re cracked and dipping down in a perfect spiral, like a funnel that ends in a little pit at the dead center of the lobby.

  Dead center where a woman stands.

  My jaw drops. Like in the movies when someone has that big revelation moment, like every plot point suddenly comes together and the world’s not the same anymore. That’s me, jaw dropped, eyes locked on the woman in the spiral of destruction where flames and fury couldn’t touch her if they tried.

  Three minutes remain.

  “Harper, is that—?”

  “Yes,” I answer, my every bone trembling, my every nerve as tight as glass, “Yes, that’s her.”

  Please remember this. Every sweet smile of an employee is a goldmine of answers begging to be tapped, but all you do is take your change and go.

  “Harper,” she breathes at my neck, terrified.

  I keep moving my feet, one in front of the other like I’m walking a tightrope across a stage that’s on fire. All those sounds you hear in the movies, the rage and rumble of a burning building, it sounds so much scarier in real life, almost unreal compared to the movies we’ve become used to. What I hear is the hiss of a snake, so much more terrifying in the flesh. I hear the roar of a prowling lion and its deadly throat-rippling purr meant to soothe you before its teeth find your face. These sounds and others are what you hear in the bowels of a burning movie theater that’s quite literally swallowing itself from the inside-out.

  And in my daze of descending into the spiral of broken tiles, my foot collides into a body. When I glance down, I see the pretty blue eyes of my boss, peering up at me with this vacant look of peace in them, doll-like, like he’s asleep, dreaming something nice, something perfect.

  Why is my boss lying on the floor of the lobby, motionless, still.

  What’s that tiny little hole in his forehead.

  There’s a sudden sound. I turn. Machnik is sliding down the wall, then he drops to the floor, wheezes, his eyes wet with astonishment.

  Literally, I don’t know what just happened. Your mind, you regress to infancy in a situation like this. Everything you see is a wonderment to your eye, a curiosity, not really real.

  What I’m trying to say is even shadows have dark spots.

  Two minutes left and I spot Nicolas, I don’t know how. He’s slumped backwards over a concession register. His steely eyes, glass, staring outward. A small stream of bright red trickles down his nose.

  You deny what you see without knowing you’ve done a thing.

  This is the moment when my eyes really take in the whole scene.
All across the shattered lobby, there’s about two or three or eleven bodies, people just laying in the strangest configurations of limbs and purses and clothes, sprawled out like they were sprinkled there from the ceiling. It’s a frightening sight to behold, that for as many people that were shot, there is so little blood.

  And then I hear the shattering of glass to my left. I turn to look and see nothing. I have no idea what’s shattered ... a vase, a tile, a person.

  There’s another sound.

  Mica, she was standing at my side. She isn’t anymore.

  I spot a petite girl on the ground in front of the box office door, stretched out like she’d attempted to escape, and something very loud and sudden stopped her from doing so. A crumbled ceiling tile covers her legs like a soft blanket, as if someone put her to bed, tucked her in after reading some lovely bedtime story, and her empty eyes stare at me even from across the lobby and through the inferno. Like they’re watching. But we both know no one’s watching from those empty eyes. Her spunky ponytail, now a matted mess across her face.

  And those pink-rimmed glasses I’ve seen her wear a million times, they’re balanced perfectly atop a broken floor tile four feet in front of her lifeless face. This girl we’ve sentenced to death.

  This is my fault. This is all my fault.

  I reach the center of the spiral of destruction, the center of the lobby, the oblivion core. Twenty-two feet in front of me is the woman I know so well, the woman I know so little. She’s every bit as beautiful as she was when I last saw her, and that terrifies me.

  She used to sell tickets with such a sweet smile on her face. Now she’s holding a gun, still hot from the last three lives it’s taken. She’s taken. Her eyes, they’re feral, hungry, mad. Blood is in her hair.

  That sweet smile of the ticket seller I once knew, it’s long gone.

  Here, in the center of the spiral of everything that beget everything that brought me to this day, from five months ago, from ten years ago, from the day I was born all the way up to this little moment here in the lobby of Garden Cinema 8 where I belong.

  She remains, the only person still standing besides myself.

  The earth shudders, like it threatens to move the building again. White, beautiful flames still lick every wall.

  A little woven purse dangles in her left hand, a gun in her right.

  I swallow once, and open my mouth to speak.

  She speaks first: “Is today the day?”

  One minute remains.

  super psycho future killers

  172:23:28

  Working every night at the movies isn’t all bad. You get to know the stars. I can’t get used to the way they make me feel, just looking at one. Peering up at that spot in the sky, knowing it was there when I was a kid, knowing it’s watched me my whole life. A star is like a dad, existing long before I was born. And like a son, existing long after I’m gone. It’s evidence that I was here, and that I won’t be, someday.

  But first thing’s first: My coworkers are bitching about movies.

  “To be honest, I don’t like tragic endings,” Worth goes on, sitting on the concession manager’s desk swinging her pencil legs back and forth. “They’re all so predictable and tired-out and done-already. I don’t even cry anymore. I’m just like, oh geez, he dies in the end, great, didn’t see that coming.”

  “Ugh,” Miss Mica moans in agreement.

  “I don’t like happy endings either. The kind where two lovers run together in slow-mo at the last minute. Ugh, you know they’re going to make it, am I right.”

  Over in the corner of the office is Machnik texting on his phone. He could be texting his brother about a party, could be typing up a thesis to end world hunger, could be playing cell-to-cell Scrabble. You can’t tell and you don’t ask.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Mica is touching up her face in a tiny purse-mirror, dabbing under her eyes, pulling a loose bit of skin, releasing, pulling, releasing.

  “I mean, for real. Give me another psychological thriller where the twist in the end is the main character is the killer. Give me another romantic comedy where two lovebirds clumsily meet, fall in love, have a falling out, then somehow reconcile at the end. Give me another vampire love story.”

  “No, don’t,” Mica says, and they both laugh.

  I shift my weight and my chair squeaks really loud. No one notices.

  “How late is he?” Mica asks quietly.

  Worth twists around to look at the wall clock behind her. “Thirty-three minutes. You know how he hates coming in at night.”

  “If he doesn’t show in another ten,” Mica says to her little purse-mirror, running a finger smooth across her pencil eyebrow, “I’m saying fuck this and grabbing some late night kamikaze with Charles.”

  A new voice jumps into the conversation from the other side of the room, a big man voice from a woman called Patricia Plein: “Call me a bitch, but I think the reason is, see, the world has this big stash of ideas, this big communal stash of genius, and it’s all run out.”

  The two of them, Worth and Mica, they turn and regard Plein like she’s a disease. Worth even wrinkles up her face, the way you do when you smell something rank. “What are you talking about?”

  “Call me a bitch,” Plein goes on, “but ya wonder why everything lately’s a sequel to some other sequel. Or a remake of something. Hey, look, a movie we haven’t remade, let’s remake it better!—let’s remake it worse! Don’t you feel lucky to be alive in this cesspool era of reheated microwave-dishes of movie ideas?”

  Mica and Worth share a look. Worth says, “‘Lucky’ wouldn’t be the word ...”

  “I’m tellin’ ya, it’s doomsday,” Plein says, her husky voice rolling over the room like a bowling ball. “Einsteins and Mozarts and Picassos, they ain’t born in eras like this one where kids’ attention spans stop at the screen of an iPhone. It’s no wonder there ain’t new brilliant ideas, we’re too distracted to get them.”

  “Uh huh,” Worth says. You can’t tell if she’s agreeing with her or wanting her to shut up.

  Miss Meredith Mica, I like. Wouldn’t call her a friend, or be stuck in an elevator with her, but I can work with her. As for the icicle called Rebecca Worth, she wouldn’t sell tickets next to me if I paid her. I’m sure she only takes payment in the form of children’s tears.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Plein grunts, “I wouldn’t put my money on the future of the movie biz. It’s as dead as the rotary phone.”

  Though all the concessionists call her Ms. Plein, now and then she gets a Mister. It’s completely unintentional. She asks for ma’am, she gets sir. She stopped correcting them years ago.

  I break a smile and say, “Hey, I still have a rotary—”

  “Meredith,” Worth barks, cutting me off. “How about let’s both get out of here and grab some late night Japanese. Unless I get a call from him, I’m gone.”

  “Yeah. This meeting isn’t going to happen.”

  The two of them like a pair of wicked sisters, they saunter out of the office together. Machnik peers up from his phone like he’d just returned from a trance, sweat formed across his brow, he says, “What?”

  I smile in his direction and say, “They’re just—”

  “There ain’t no meeting no more,” Plein says, cutting me off. “Looks like boss man stood us up again. Not that I give a hoot, these meetings blow balls.”

  Machnik squints at her, phone hanging in his hand, he says, “What?”

  Plein gets up from her chair, waddles past him and says, “Just get back to work, Machnik. I need to do me an inventory.”

  The office door slams shut on her way out.

  Machnik peers over at me from across the room, the only person left. I just shrug and smile in my chair. The office is so quiet now, you can hear the chirping of crickets above the ceiling tiles.

  After another twenty passes, I make my way downstairs to the theater lobby. It’s another calm school night. Our only concessionist is bent over his register talking t
o our only usher, who leans against the counter with a broom and dustpan. The usher makes some joke, the concessionist busts out in laughter that fills the empty lobby, its echoes bouncing everywhere.

  Ms. Worth doesn’t like tragic endings. Neither do I, but I’ll still hold the door open after your movie ends and say, Hope you had a great time! After you’ve watched the world end in one way or another, I’ll be holding the door open and saying, Have a great rest of your day! I’ll smile too, like I’m apologizing all day long for something I didn’t do. You’ll ignore me and walk on. I’ll smile at your back. My hand cramps from the door handle, my arm’s in pain, I just keep showing my teeth.

  The least you expect is a thank you, or a nod, but really a person like me is just a doorstop, no matter how bright the smile. Even in a suit and tie, you’re just a doorstop with a face.

  Remember to smile sweetheart, everyone’s watching.

  Celeste asks me, “Is today the day?”

  Staring at the night sky through the box office window, I’m searching for a star when I smile and murmur, “I don’t think so.”

  She’s my favorite, Celeste. Everyone needs a favorite at work. It’s the only way to keep from stabbing someone in the face. It’s not that I’m prone to violence, but you should never underestimate the power of a dead-end customer service job.

  Welcome to the Garden Cinema 8, how may I help you?

  Stab. Right in the face.

  “Has he already given you the good news?” she asks.

  “He didn’t show up for the meeting.”

  After giving me a little frown, she turns to greet our first customer in over twenty minutes: “Welcome to the Garden Cinema 8, how may I help you?”

  Whenever Celeste’s on the clock, I’m always right there with her in the box office, the way fire is pulled to a way out, or star matter to a black hole.

  A bullet to its victim.

  “No, I haven’t seen it yet,” she admits to the customer, “but I can tell you, according to my computer it’s rated ‘R’ for violence, language, and a rape scene.”