CHAPTER 7
“If you want to kill someone, you do it, you do it right then, out loud. Otherwise, the moment just… passes you by.”
—Not My Best Friend’s Wedding
“Is anyone hurt?”
Wes’s voice is even more raspy than before, the question jarring in the stunned aftermath of what was supposed to be a normal, fun, nonmurdery night.
It’s also kind of ironic given the scene around us, and the fact he’s holding a weapon as he says it.
I can’t find it in me to point out the obvious.
No one can. We all just shake our heads and then, one by one, survey the room.
Take in the way most of the tables and chairs are splayed across the space, how the blood spatters on the gas lamps look almost intentional from afar, or how there is a clear distinction between the red shag of the carpet and the darker-toned stains that spread across it.
Those details are going to form the backdrop of our nightmares from now on. If we can get out of here, that is.
John is the one who finally speaks, combing a hand through his hair and confirming that that cute, disheveled look is entirely by accident as he states, “We can’t stay here.”
“You want to go up there?” Dr—Stu, damn it, says incredulously, pointing to the shard-like section of stairs visible through the doorframe.
Aside from Curtis, the other bodies—our host and the bartenders, people who were just here because of their job—make heinous markers toward the exit.
I saw the daters who panicked and ran out of the room going in that direction before the lights cut out again, and I think it’s safe to say the killer worked their way toward the stairs just the same as those who were trying to escape.
After that initial scream, and those heavy panicked footfalls, the level above us is now eerily silent, and that prompts the question: Who made the right choice?
Those who ran, or those who hid? With the killer upstairs the answer might be obvious, but there is one advantage the runners have that we don’t: they’re closer to accessing the outside world through those heavy double doors, while we’re standing in a basement surrounded by four bodies.
“I don’t think there’s an exit down here,” I say, memories of Laurie and me stumbling around this level after we’d had a few Kamikazes running through my head.
“You’ve been here before?” John asks, moving farther into the room. Farther away from Marion’s body.
I nod. “It’s been a few years, but I remember that. Right, Laurie?”
“Right,” she replies automatically, her eyes glued to the ceiling in an attempt to avoid looking at the puddle of blood seeping into the carpet at our feet.
“There are stairs on that side, too.” I point to the other archway with my free hand. Nobody tried to go that way because terror gives you tunnel vision. “We could go up that way, cross the dance floor, and try to get to the front entrance.”
I don’t know how my voice is so steady. I don’t know how I’m thinking so straight, but I’m certain that being underground is not a good idea, and that this bar is far more claustrophobic than I first thought. There’s also the voice in my head that keeps reminding me I’ve seen this movie before.
“Try?” the Kate Hudson blonde in the pink dress says.
Colette. She must’ve been at a table close to the bar, because a heavy spray of blood covers the left side of her body.
The loopy handwriting and the cute heart on her name tag are covered with it.
The sticker may as well just be one big block of red, and when she gingerly peels it off and blood soaks into the untouched square of knit material beneath it, she gags.
I want to pick up a napkin from the bar and offer it to her, even a paper coaster, but it would be useless… they’re all soaked.
“Whoever did this, they’re probably still up there,” I say, because I doubt the killer slaughtered four—probably five, if that scream overhead was anything to go by—people and then decided to call it a night and flick through some new releases on Netflix.
“I don’t think they’re just going to let us walk out. ”
I make the mistake of glancing over at Wes and he goes from looking gravely at the two dead bartenders to staring back at me with that same intense, guarded look from before.
Before. When I joked about this very thing happening.
God, to think I was babbling about how the very scenario we’re living out would be the worst way to end our night.
My manifestations about my career and love life never come to fruition, but I utter the words “speed date” and “killer” in the same sentence once and speak it into existence?
“Why?” sobs the woman with the Meg Ryan haircut. I squint across the room at her clean name tag and spy “Dani”—right. It’s clear she doesn’t expect anyone to answer. Even when she follows up with, “Why are they doing this?”
It’s not the right question to be asking.
Motive never matters, and sometimes it doesn’t even exist. For every I Know What You Did Last Summer there’s a Slumber Party Massacre.
We could be dealing with a Ben Willis, out for revenge, as much as a mindless killing machine after some cheap thrills like Russ Thorn.
Colette wraps her least bloody arm around Dani, and again I look to the bar for something to mop at Dani’s tears. The same napkins are still sitting there, seeped in blood.
Wes finally drops his arm down from the defensive position, his knuckles still white around the chair leg, and takes a step away from the table.
“Jamie’s right. We need to get upstairs, get outside, and call for help.”
He seems to function very well under pressure. It’s an admirable quality. One I would’ve liked to discover under different circumstances. If only I hadn’t mentioned Jeffrey Dahmer on our date.
“If we work together,” he says, “look out for each other… it’ll be eight against one.”
He reaches up with his other hand and peels off his name tag.
Unlike Colette, who did it out of necessity, his action feels more like a symbolic end to our time down here, and I watch as the others follow his lead and rip the sticky paper off their clothes.
I look down at my own sticker and there are flecks of blood on the blank spaces between the letters of my name.
I grasp the name tag and pull it off as Laurie says, “What about the others?”
Right, because there were twenty of us daters.
“They probably got out. We just have to get to the front door,” John says, and his words seem to make her breathe a little easier.
I’ll admit, they do the same for me, too, but then I remember those footsteps I heard above our heads.
They didn’t sound like they were running toward the front door—they sounded like they were running away from it, and if this were a horror movie, then—
“I’ll go first,” Wes says, and it pulls me away from jumping to a conclusion that is not a good one. He waves the chair leg in his hand like it’s a tour guide flag and we’re about to walk through Manhattan to see all the hot spots of Sex and the City.
“We’ll go up single file. Watch each other’s backs… Anyone want to take up the rear?”
“I’ll do it,” John says weakly.
He shuffles on the spot and then heads to the bar. Scanning the bottles like he’s picking out an appropriate aperitif for the occasion, he grabs an almost-empty bottle of Midori. After passing it awkwardly between his palms, he looks at me as if I’m the expert on bottle smashing.
I mime hitting my bottle against the table, and when he slams the frosted bottle down on the corner of the bar top, green liqueur mixes with the bright, oxidizing pools of red.
His actions start off a chain reaction, and after a few more daters smash bottles on the blood-covered bar, I feel somewhat relieved.
The fact that everyone looks uncomfortable holding something sharp in their hands supports my “the killer is upstairs” theory, and the panic that pushed my espresso martinis up into my chest starts to abate.
Because I know the way out of the basement, I go second after Wes.
Laurie steps up behind me and I reach back to clasp one hand around her limp wrist, tightening the other on the brown neck of my bottle.
After Laurie is Stu, and I get the feeling their date was much more successful than ours from the way he reaches out and touches her elbow.
She manages to pull her lips into the smallest of smiles in reply, hinting at just how much Stu’s combination of beard, mountain wear, and strong-looking thighs appeals to her.
That makes me grimace. Laurie may be a Capricorn, but you can tell she’s a Taurus moon from the way she runs headfirst toward walking red flags.
Colette and Dani line up behind Stu, then it’s the guy who was supposed to be my last date.
It’s only from a quick glimpse of the sticker on his shirt, before he peeled it off, that I learn his name is Campbell.
He hasn’t spoken a word—he’s just followed the paths and actions of the people closest to him.
And I know four people just died in front of us, but that, paired with his unthreatening, boyish good looks makes me immediately associate him with Norman Bates.
I can’t help it. Maybe it’s the way he goes from being fidgety one minute to distant and unblinking the next, but I’m kind of glad we’re on opposite ends of the line.
If he does decide to speak and his first words are about his mother, I’m pointing the finger at him.