Greg rolled off of Sandy, and she got out of bed to clean up. He heard the shower running, and considered going in to join her, but opted against it. The whole room was like a Marcy Playground song, so a little funk from him wouldn’t matter, and he really just wanted to relax, watch Tonight!, and get stoned. To that end, he started rooting through his nightstand, until he came up with an ashtray and his rolling kit, which he laid out in front of him.
The TV was already tuned in, but he grabbed the remote from Sandy’s nightstand to up the volume a bit. Johnny was talking to some woman he’d never seen before, but he thought she was certainly someone he’d like to see a lot more of. He loved Sandy, of course, but he was still a man, and still happy to take a good long look at anyone with legs like that.
The running water turned off, and Greg stopped focusing on the woman’s legs. He finished rolling the joint, a task he could do blindfolded at this point, and started looking for a lighter. The screen dimmed, and he glanced up at it, but he had already spotted the lighter barely peeking out under the nightstand and crawled down on the floor to grab it. As he stood back up, he was just in time to see Sandy coming out of the bathroom, and he paused to admire her as she walked toward the bed.
Time had been good to her – good to them both, really, but much better to her. Her mocha brown skin was still smooth and tight, and while she had a few lines around her eyes, they were a lot finer than a forty-year-old woman could expect, much less one on the other side of fifty. Her long brown hair was as silky as ever, shining even in the dim light of the bedroom. And all of that paled before what was his and hers alone – her body was as glorious to him as the first time he saw it, better than 20 years ago. He could look at the legs of a random celebrity and love it, but in the end, he compared everything to her, and they all fell short.
Sandy finished rolling her hair up in a towel and looked up to see Greg staring at her. She blushed, still able to be embarrassed by him all these years later. She was jealous of him, as always – men had it so much easier, growing ‘distinguished’ as they aged, rather than saggy and wrinkled like women did. His sandy brown hair had thinned a touch over the years, and grey appeared at his temples, but it looked good on him. No need for regular dying to remove the touch of grey, no need for creams and lotions to tighten up the skin, or makeup to cover the wrinkles and spots that come with age. Certainly, the muscles weren’t as taut as when they were in their 20s, but she always liked the dad bod more than the ripped look, and he was still in the kind of shape that could keep up with her for a long weekend hiking or a longer one staying in bed. She crawled onto the bed, and into his arms, reveling in the feeling of protection she got when he wrapped himself around her. She kissed him deeply and sighed contentedly. “Did I thank you yet?” she asked him, and he chuckled.
“I thought I was thanking you for that one,” he said with a smile. She grabbed a few pillows and sat back against the headboard with him. As he lit the joint and took a long drag, she kissed him again, breathing in the smoke, then leaned back and blew it out slowly. “Hey now,” Greg said, “you’re going to have to give me at least an hour before you go doing that.”
“An hour? I remember when it would take you fifteen minutes.” She laughed as he swatted her with a pillow, and the two leaned against each other, supported by the piles of pillows and the headboard. They focused in on the TV, just as the unknown woman aimed a double entendre at Johnny, and the screen faded to black, lingering on that large smile. Commercials started up, and the two promptly ignored the screen as it started flogging an energy drink. The two shared another hit from the joint and settled in to wait for the high as the TV changed to the next commercial.
As the screen brightened just enough to see what was going on, Sandy straightened and put her hand on Greg’s chest. “Babe, isn’t that the port?” she said, recognizing the field of stones by the dock and the rise of land across the bay. Greg nodded as he looked on – it was definitely the port at night, although it wasn’t clear why it was being shown. As the camera pulled away from the water, he identified it as Seaport Boulevard, with the city laid out before him. He let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding when the eerie music stopped – he’d always hated whatever it was, and it seemed to be used in every horror movie that ever existed.
The camera started to move, pulling in low over Seaport, moving away from the water, and picking up speed as it reached Woodside. Greg figured that this had to have been shot on location, but he hadn’t heard a word about filming going on over the last year or so. It would have had to have been the previous winter, he thought, with the frost visible on the rocks by the shore, but how did he miss the filming going on? Must be mostly done on a sound stage, and they shot this for the trailer alone.
Greg was pulled out of his thoughts as Sandy gasped. He barely caught a glimpse of what she had seen – the camera was moving faster by the moment. The view blew through the Junction and was flying down El Camino. Sandy was gripping his hand tightly now, her need to watch horror movies in full conflict with her need to cover her eyes while she did. Greg watched closer and saw the things flashing by in the dark. Under the awning of a liquor store – it looked like a pile of trash, but that was a hand sticking out of it. The brickwork on a Thai place was stained with some liquid, which had to be blood.
The images passed by quicker and quicker, and Greg was only able to make out the horror flick staples when the camera slowed slightly while rounding a corner. Glimpses of bodies, broken windows dark red with slowly drying blood, and rats coming out from the shadows to devour what was left behind, were all present as the trailer seemed to be moving from creepy to horror overload. The camera was spiraling around City Hall, as it had now moved to Broadway. The Fox Theater held the most disturbing sight during the trip – as the camera passed, a man staggered toward the street, holding his intestines with one hand, and reaching towards the screen with the other. It flashed by quickly enough that Greg would have missed it if the old landmark hadn’t drawn his eye.
That creepy, screeching music was back, and Greg’s skin began to crawl. It became more overwhelming as the camera sped by, but luckily backed off a bit as the camera slowed. The camera was approaching the redwood grove by City Hall, and a feeling of dread settled over Greg. He didn’t know why – the only horror movie to ever scare him was Silence of the Lambs, and this was shaping up to be more of a gore fest than something like that. But the dread was there, and he saw it coming from Sandy when he looked down at her.
Sandy’s hand had slowly drifted from covering her eyes – she loved watching things that would scare her through slitted fingers, getting just a little bit of the delightful frisson that came from a good fright. But something about this was moving past the normal thrill, into a harrowing journey through her hometown that forced her to stare. She was sure she saw bodies on the screen as the camera circled the city, which she expected from a horror trailer. But when the camera went by Harry’s Hofbrau, she would swear the decapitated head under the traffic light belonged to her favorite bartender. That was disturbing enough, but maybe he was an aspiring actor who got a small role in the film.
What she couldn’t explain away – what she was sure would keep her up tonight – was the man at the Fox Theater. The man holding his intestines in his hands, reaching out for someone to save him. That was Billy. Not a doubt in her mind – she recognized the long winter coat she had scrounged up for him two winters back, recognized the stained Giants beanie he wore over his stringy grey hair, recognized the swollen red nose and patchy beard. That was Billy, and there was no way Billy was in a movie. On a good day, Billy recognized her as the sandwich lady, and would talk for a few minutes while eating his favorite roast beef, before retreating back to the alley near the theater. On a bad day, he’d shout at her approach and throw bits of trash in her direction, forcing her to leave a care package at the mouth of the alley and hope he’d come to get it. Working with strangers, long enough to get into the kind of prosthetics necessary for such a scene? Not a chance.
Greg didn’t know who Billy was, so couldn’t have caught his presence. He supported her work, of course, and gave generously, but going to meet them wasn’t something he had ever done. She would have told him, but as the camera finally arrived at City Hall, the figures on the screen grabbed her focus. Any doubts about that being Billy were immediately crushed as she took in the people crucified on the lower branches of the trees. Most of the trees - the bigger ones with trunks twenty or more feet across - had a bodie nailed into the trunk, and it didn’t take long for her to recognize them.
“My God, Greg, is that Mayor Lee?” she said, although she knew the answer. That was the mayor, and she noted their councilwoman one tree over. Both of them were clearly dead, throats cut and the last of their blood dripping from their slashed throats. Below the mayor was a child, somewhere under ten years old, wearing white clothes that had become drenched in the mayor’s blood. He was catching the last few drops of blood to fall in his mouth, and a look of pleasure crossed his face with each new drop. The councilwoman had her own child sitting beneath her, this one a bit younger, but every bit as eager for the blood dripping down.
Sandy tried to close her eyes, but couldn’t make herself look away. She was focused on the child below the councilwoman – she thought it was a little girl, but couldn’t be sure – and the look of avarice she displayed. None of the horror movies she had seen could compare to that look, as the blood drained from a woman she knew, if not well. She missed the first appearance of the gaunt, pale man, although she certainly saw him as he approached the councilwoman.
Time seemed to slow for Sandy, as every frame was burned into her mind. The man approached the child and reached out to stroke her hair. The girl looked up at him, her eyes gleaming with hunger, and she licked her bloody lips in anticipation. He said something, and the girl stood. The two moved together to another tree, where a man struggled to lift himself up enough to take another breath. The girl's eyes flashed in the floodlights, and her lips peeled back from her teeth as she looked ready to leap at the man and rip his throat out herself. The man held one hand out, palm down, and she kneeled, head tilted up towards the hanging victim.
Somehow, the gaunt man reached up with a clawed hand, stretching upwards to the victim’s throat. Sandy saw the victim’s face, and had a brief thought that she was looking at Chris Wondolowski, although she was never a big enough fan of the ‘Quakes to be sure. Any chance of recognition was gone as the claw reached his throat, ripping it out in one motion and unleashing a torrent of blood on the child below. She drank greedily from the fountain as the gaunt man moved on, moving to get the most of the blood as the pumping heart slowly stopped.
Greg realized that Sandy had frozen, and he admitted to himself that there was something particularly disturbing about the trailer. He would not have expected members of the council to participate, although he didn’t know what kind of deal they may have gotten for the city by doing so. He had no idea that Wondo had decided to try his hand at acting since his retirement, but he has the fans to make a go of it. He wasn’t much of a sports fan, himself, but it didn’t take much to be aware of Wondolowski living by the Bay.
He stopped considering the post-retirement careers of athletes as the gaunt man seemed to focus on the camera. The stringy, sticky hair of the man nearly covered the left side of his face, while the pale skin that was visible was heavily splattered with blood. His eyes burned with a red light, enough that his left could be seen glowing through the bloody hair. Those eyes focused squarely on the camera, and Greg jumped slightly, feeling as though the man was staring directly at him. Seconds ticked by slowly as the gaze burned through the screen and into Greg’s brain, and Greg reassessed whether it was appropriate to call the figure a man. Just that look was quickly moving him into the same company as Hannibal Lecter, and Greg resolved to not watch whatever movie this was.
Suddenly, the face approached the screen at a blinding speed, blocking out everything else in a fraction of a second. Greg shouted and threw his hand up to ward off the attack, before remembering he was safe in bed and watching a commercial. Screams came from the screen as that damned annoying instrument played louder and louder, and the camera seemed to hit the ground. The lens was cracked diagonally across the screen, causing the world to appear broken and twisted. As Greg’s heart slowed back down, he admired the effect, and how it bisected the City Hall sign that simply said Redwood City.
The shot lingered a bit too long in the end, Greg thought, before the sign seemed to bleed new letters. The “Red” was quickly covered, replaced by dripping letters that changed it to “Deadwood City” – not the most original title, but probably the entire reason they were setting it here. The words “Coming Soon” faded in below the sign, and as the screams slowly died, so did the entire thing fade to black. Greg took a deep breath and turned to Sandy. Sandy looked up at him, true fear in her eyes, which scared Greg more than anything else. Her hand was ice cold as she clung to him, and her voice trembled slightly as she spoke.
”What the fuck?”
