The Nightmare Game_Slayers Read online

  “Still good?” Paxton called from across the room. “Any new messages?”

  Chase flipped the phone open, but there were no new messages or missed calls. She hadn’t really expected any new contact, but it was still disappointing.

  The phone was another of her parents’ emergency contingencies. They’d all memorized its number, and the family kept it charged at all times. It was always at the house if there was anyone home, or with one of their parents if the family was away.

  “If you ever get in trouble,” Jack had said, “you call that number. Someone will answer it right away. And if you ever hear that phone ring, you pick it up. Someone needs your help.”

  Chase checked to make sure the messages they’d saved on the phone were still there. The first one had come in two weeks after their parents went missing. There’d been others, but there was no pattern to when new ones would show up on the phone. The caller ID was always blocked, and the messages were always short, and so cryptic and vague it was impossible to make any sense of them. If there was a code hidden in the times, Chase hadn’t been able to figure it out, and neither had Paxton.

  Their parents were gone, and the only clues they had were a few nonsense messages on a cheap prepaid phone and the hand-typed murder manual.

  Chase wanted to punch something, but instead she turned her attention to something more constructive.

  “Go ahead and unpack,” she said to her brother. “I’ll get our dinner going while you stow your things and relax. Not sure how long we’ll be here, but we might as well get as comfortable as possible and get some rest. Something tells me it’s going to be a long few days, at least.”

  While Paxton pulled his suitcase off the rack attached to the back of his wheelchair, Chase retrieved a small electric teakettle from her backpack. She also grabbed the ramen noodle package she’d brought in from the van with her.

  Chase hauled her cooking supplies into the bathroom. She filled the kettle with water from the sink, then plugged it into the outlet just under the light switch inside the door. The cord wouldn’t reach very far, forcing Chase to balance the kettle precariously in the sink.

  She closed the toilet’s cheap plastic lid, and eased her weight down onto it, testing to make sure she wasn’t going to break it and plunge into the water. She cradled the package of dehydrated noodles in her lap and blew out a long, weary sigh.

  A quiet thread of anxiety unspooled from the bottom of her heart and coiled around her thoughts like a strand of cruel barbed wire. They were running low on everything. Money, food, time. Chase desperately wanted someone to tell her what to do, but she knew there was no advice coming her way from any quarter.

  Her parents were gone, Paxton was older than Chase, but she knew he was just as clueless as she was about what they should do.

  Find mom and dad, she thought. Just keep looking.

  While the teakettle burbled, Chase ran some water from the tub’s taps and used it to rinse the sweat from her face. She needed a real shower after dinner, but just then she’d settle for a quick splash.

  “You okay in there?” Paxton called from the other room.

  Chase looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were sunken, and dark circles had blossomed around them like patches of bruise-purple flowers. The rest of her face had no color, and her veins stood out against her pale skin like blue threads spread across a sheet of printer paper. “Yeah,” she responded, “I’m just peachy.”

  “I don’t suppose that bathroom is wheelchair accessible,” Paxton called.

  “No,” Chase said, looking into the cracked and stained tub. “But I’ll give you a hand. I promise not to peek.”

  Years of helping Paxton in and out of his wheelchair, helping him get in and out of places where someone hadn’t considered making things a little easier for people who weren’t just like them, had numbed Chase to the whole process. Her brother needed help, so she helped him. That’s just the way things were.

  By the time Paxton had finished his business and Chase had taken a piss, the electric teakettle was emitting a feeble whistle.

  Chase peeled the plastic wrapper from two of the paper cups next to the sink, broke the ramen package in half, and prepared half a serving of soup for each of them in one of the cups. She brought the meager meal to her brother and sat on the edge of the bed while she waited for the boiling water to transform the brittle noodles into something resembling food.

  Paxton didn’t have Chase’s patience. He blew on the soup, then chugged a mouthful of the vaguely beefy, extremely salty broth and some crunchy noodles from his cup. “I say we just take the town apart,” Paxton offered. “Little place like this shouldn’t take us too long to tear through it. You start kicking ass until somebody tells us where they took mom and dad.”

  Chase sipped at her cup of noodles. “We could try, but at the end of the day all that would do is rile them all up. I don’t want to spend the last hours of my life fighting off a horde of angry hillbillies with shotguns and pitchforks.”

  “I don’t think they’re technically hillbillies,” Paxton offered. “I mean, they live in a valley.”

  “I don’t think it matters, and I don’t think I’m going to kick anybody’s ass,” Chase said. “We’ll play it cool, look around, ask some questions, and hope we get another text message that’s more informative than what we’ve gotten up until now.”

  Paxton gulped down another mouthful of noodles. “Shit, we might even have some cousins or something around here that would be interested to know where mom and dad got off to.”

  Chase chewed on the thought, but she couldn’t swallow it. “You ever hear mom and dad talk about where they came from? Ever even see a picture of our grandparents?”

  Paxton grumbled because this was a particularly sore spot with him. He’d wanted to do some genetic counseling when he got older, figure out what was wrong with his legs, but his parents had refused to help him reach out to their extended families.

  “Past is past,” their father had said.

  “Blood under the bridge,” their mother had added.

  And yet, people in Crucible recognized their name. “Maybe they left for a reason,” Chase said.

  They ate their noodles in silence, mulling over their thoughts. Chase almost dropped her cup when the phone beeped.

  Paxton was closer, and he snatched it off the dresser with his left hand. “Text message,” he said, pointing out the obvious.

  He flipped the phone open and looked at its face. Then he showed it to Chase with a frown.

  Weapon

  Mask

  Victim

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Paxton asked.

  Chase’s vision narrowed to a black tunnel filled by the message. She’d seen that exact list just a few hours before.

  She twisted around on the bed to reach her backpack, and drained the last of her soup. Chase pulled the murder manual from the pack’s interior pocket and showed it to her brother.

  “Those are the Tools of the Hunter,” she said. “Wait, that’s not right.”

  She flipped through the book, searching its sloppy pages for the list.

  “Here it is,” she said, turning the book toward Paxton. “I had it wrong. It’s not the Tools of the Hunter.

  “They’re the Tools of the Slayer.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Murder Manual

  Paxton furrowed his brow as he studied the slender book Chase had pushed into his hands. The old ink was so blurred and faded the words seemed to waver and wobble on the pages. He tried to concentrate and make some sense of it, but he finally gave up and closed the book. “I still can’t make heads or tails out of this. Either my eyes are going bad at the ripe old age of 21, or yours are supernaturally sharp.”

  Chase took the book and raised an eyebrow at Paxton. “You really are turning into an old man. It’s under part one, Gathering Your Forces. A Slayer requires but three items to conquer The Nightmare Game and preserve the balance for another cycl
e. First, the Slayer must adopt a weapon. The weapon destroys the slayer’s enemies, but it is also the implement used to harvest victims. Without a weapon, the Slayer has no hope of surviving the Nightmare Game.”

  “I don’t know how you can read that,” Paxton said, squinting at Chase. “It sounds like some shit you’d make up after going on a ketamine and D&D bender.”

  The rest of the chapter was no less insane. Even though she’d already studied the book cover to cover, Chase couldn’t believe how nuts it sounded when she read it aloud. She wiggled her eyebrows at Paxton before diving into the next section. “The Mask reveals the Slayer’s true soul and unlocks the greatest of his powers. After donning the mask, the Slayer is armored by the might of his soul, and his abilities are strengthened. Though an armed Slayer is always fearsome, he is vulnerable until a mask is adopted. Wearing the mask transforms a mere man into the Slayer, and changes him forever.”

  “Kind of sexist, right?” Paxton leaned back in his chair and tossed his empty ramen cup into the wastebasket next to the TV stand. “Who says a Slayer has to be a boy?”

  Chase tossed her own cup away and stood up from the bed as she prepared to continue reading. “Yeah, there’s a whole ‘firstborn son of each generation’ vibe running through this whole book. It’s like they couldn’t fathom the idea that someone might have a daughter.”

  “Or that the firstborn son might be a gimp,” Paxton said through a grin that didn’t entirely mask the pain behind his self-deprecating humor. “I bet whoever wrote that thing would be just thriiiilled to see me playing his little game, right? Is there a section on magic wheelchairs? Ooh, I know. They have magic leg braces, so I don’t have to stay in this thing. When do we get to those?”

  “Ha, you’re a funny guy. There’s nothing anywhere near that cheerful in this damned book.” Chase stretched, then looked back at the book in her hand. “The powers granted from the weapon and the mask are mighty, but their use drains the Slayer’s spiritual energies. This vital force can only be replenished by claiming the essence of the Slayer’s chosen victims. While Slayers may benefit from the souls of those outside their selected prey, it is impossible to sustain themselves for long in this way.”

  With practiced ease, Paxton dragged himself out of his chair and into bed. He used his strong arms to crab-walk up to sit at the head of the bed. “Weapons, masks, and victims. Sounds like the basics of every great slasher movie ever. Whoever wrote that thing just described Jason, Michael, and Leatherface in one go.”

  Chase dropped the book on the bed and stalked around the confines of their stinking motel room. She didn’t like where Paxton’s line of reasoning was headed and needed to distract herself from it. “You look at these pictures while I was cooking dinner?”

  She stopped pacing in front of a cockeyed picture hanging above the dresser. The black-and-white photograph contained a dour-faced family. The father and mother stood behind their son, who leaned against a pitchfork. His sister stood next to him, her hand resting protectively on his hip. The family stood in front of their home, a narrow two-story house with a pair of arched windows on the upper floor that reminded Chase of wicked, staring eyes, but there was something piled in an unruly mound behind the family. She leaned in and peered closer. Was that an arm? A naked leg? “These are creepy as fuck, Pax.”

  A small brass plaque on the bottom of the frame set the scene. Chase read it to her brother: “The Filson Family celebrates the The Nightmare Game, 1974.”

  Paxton responded, shock clear in his voice, “Are you serious? That was mom’s maiden name.”

  A chill ran down Chase’s spine as she realized her brother was right. She’d only heard the name once when her parents were arguing not long after the incident in Austin. She had eavesdropped on their raised voices but had just caught snatches of what they said, and most of it didn’t make sense to her young ears. But she’d heard something about the Filsons looking for mom. “No wonder they never talked about their families.”

  “Bring it here,” Paxton asked, and Chase hoisted the picture’s wire off the nail driven into the wall.

  “Here you go,” she said, laying it down across Paxton’s legs.

  Her brother lifted the picture and held it close to his eyes. He squinted, staring at the same weird mound that had caught Chase’s attention. “Is that a stack of dead people?”

  “Maybe?” Chase didn’t want to believe those were dismembered corpses in the background. Because if this was her mother’s family, that meant Chase was descended from a pack of homicidal maniacs. The killing rage she’d spent her whole life fighting made a sick sort of sense in light of this dark revelation. “Why would mom and dad ever come back here? Why didn’t they just take us and run like hell?”

  Paxton adjusted his weight and gave his sister an uncomfortable smirk. “Because of me. The doctors. That’s why we went to Dallas, instead of leaving Texas after the thing in Austin. They wanted me to be close to my doctors while I was a kid. And when that didn’t pan out, they probably figured they were safe to stay put, anyway. Everything seemed pretty normal after we left Austin. Until…”

  If Paxton felt guilty for needing doctors when he never learned to crawl, much less walk, Chase felt much more responsible for her part in all this. Maybe her mom’s family had sent those men to Austin. Maybe they had waited almost fifteen years to come looking for them again.

  Maybe.

  There were six more pictures on the wall, and Chase gathered them all and brought them back to her brother. She stacked them on the bed next to him, then flopped down on the other side of the pile of framed photographs. “Take a look, see if you recognize anyone else.”

  The rest of the pictures were more of the same. Rawboned Midwestern families standing in front of their homes, a masked teenage boy wielding a weapon centered in each black-and-white photograph. Chase read the names from each plaque as she lifted them from the stack. “Eldridge, Sapp, Pendleton,” she started, but Paxton grabbed the rest before she could continue.

  “Let’s see, Marsh, Shibley.” Paxton lifted the last picture and held it up for Chase to see. “Here we go.”

  “What?” Chase reached for the picture, but Paxton pulled it back from her outstretched fingers.

  Paxton held the framed picture against his chest. “Chase, I think you’re going to have to play the game.”

  She cocked her eyebrow and pursed her lips at Paxton. “That’s not ever going to fucking happen. I don’t call it the murder manual just because I’m a sarcastic little bitch. The Nightmare Game is literally about killing people. There’s shit in that book about carving out hearts and eating brains. I thought it was a roleplaying game because those are all about killing people and taking their stuff. Like, it was something Dad wrote when he was a kid, a super creepy version of Dungeons & Dragons or something.”

  Paxton paled at his sister’s description of the book’s contents, but he plunged into his reasoning before she could stop him again. “Hear me out. Mom’s family was tied up in this somehow, right? If that is a picture of her family, then her brother, who would be an uncle we’ve never heard about, has a mask and is holding a weapon in that picture. And those chopped up people would be victims, right?”

  Chase couldn’t process all the information coming at her like a firehose blast. Her mother had never spoken about her brother. Chase wondered if that’s because he was one of the men she’d killed in Austin. Were there other unknown relatives hanging out in Crucible, still thirsty for revenge?

  “I think Mom and Dad came here trying to stop this game before these crazies could catch up to us and make one of us play.” Paxton leaned back and laid the picture on his lap. “They came here and something happened to them. And I think the only way we’re going to get to the bottom of it is if you play the game.”

  “Give me the picture,” Chase snapped and snatched it away from her brother before he could stop her. She flipped it over, and her heart sank.

  The Harrow family celebrates
the Nightmare Game, 1974.

  A weathered man with dark smudges on his cheeks and forehead, like he’d been pulled away from a long day of hard, dirty work moments before the picture was taken stood next to a painfully thin woman with deep creases encircling her eyes and mouth. She held a baby who stared out of the picture with startling intensity.

  Chase’s hands trembled as she realized the couple in the picture were her grandparents, and the little boy was her father. She traced her finger over her father’s young face and remembered all the time they’d spent together as she grew up. All those years of play that turned into training. How to get away from a bigger opponent. How to survive on the road. Cross-country hikes that turned into endurance races. Hours of play that had ingrained lessons for survival into her young mind and body.

  How to use a knife. How to defend yourself.

  How to kill.

  Chase met Paxton’s warm eyes, and suddenly understood his disgust at others’ pity.

  “I’m sorry, Chase,” Paxton whispered. “They didn’t want this for you. They did everything they could to stop it from happening.”

  “They trained me, Paxton,” Chase said, her entire childhood turning on its head as the missing piece of the puzzle slotted into place. “Everything they taught me was to help me survive this fucking game.”

  Chapter Eight

  Rules of The Nightmare Game: The Sacred Flesh

  The task laid upon the shoulders of a Slayer is not one for the weak of spirit or frail of body. The Nightmare Game’s pain and suffering is only the first of the dark trials a Slayer shall face in the service of the Red God. But, too, the blessings of our Lord equip the chosen for their duty.