Virgil rubbed his eyes and sighed. Brains was still concentrating fully on a technical readout on the nearest computer monitor and Gordon was pretty sure he hadn't been this tired since the last earthquake International Rescue helped with.
"Nothing," Virgil said, sleep making his voice deeper than usual. "I don't think whatever's happening is connected to this projection equipment, Brains."
"Sure doesn't look like it," Gordon confirmed.
Brains sort of half-grunted, which the young men knew by now meant some form of agreement. Then he said, "I-I'll keep at it."
"Good. My bed's calling my name," Virgil yawned.
Instead of following his brother to bed, Gordon picked up the movie chip that held Psycho, which he'd copied from his personal cloud server, and stuck it in a miniature testing projector the other side of the holo-chamber from where Brains was still inspecting data that Gordon couldn't hope to make heads or tails of.
Gordon was going to get to the bottom of this, but had no clue where to start other than the movies themselves.
S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S
Virgil scratched his fingertips through his hair as he deposited his water bottle on the nightstand in his room and, basically, fell into bed. He hummed happily as his head hit the pillow, arms sliding beneath and cradling it to the side of his face. Lazily he shook his feet until his flip-flops thunked dully one after another onto the rug-covered hardwood floor and sighed.
Just because they hadn't been able to pinpoint what made these creeps appear to them didn't mean it was anything more than holograms that couldn't hurt them. The engineer in Virgil was certain of this fact, which meant before he could even think another thought about it, he was out like a light.
Almost immediately, he began to dream.
It was night. He was outside, walking down a fog-filled alleyway that seemed to run behind rows of suburban homes. Driveways and garages and back yards lined the narrow asphalt alley and when he stopped walking and looked up and to the right, he saw a white picket fence with a white picket archway covering a gate that led from the alley into a home's back yard. Just then the lid of an old-style metal garbage can came rolling down the alley toward him. The sound of it made him jump, and when it noisily rattled to a stop, he caught sight of it and breathed a sigh of relief. There wasn't anything there but the lid.
That's when things took a turn.
At the far end of the alley where it became a T intersection, against the white backdrop of a garage's double-wide car door, a shadow appeared. It looked like a figure wearing some kind of hat. Virgil felt chills go up and down his spine. The chills turned to all-out ice in his blood when a figure emerged and began walking toward him, growling as it came nearer. The figure wore a hat, all right. And a red striped sweater and seemed to be a man...but his skin looked horrid, burned, as though years ago he'd been the victim of some terrible fire.
But it wasn't any of those things that turned Virgil's blood to ice. It was the man's hands. All eight fingers and both thumbs looked normal enough until you got to the ends of them...where they turned into ten razor blades that glinted off local yard lights. They looked sharp. They looked deadly. Virgil knew this was that movie killer called Freddy. Freddy's arms elongated unnaturally, to twice their normal length, accompanied by a low, evil-sounding laugh.
And then he started running the tips of his razor claws against a fence to his right, continuing to advance on Virgil, the most ear-splitting screech now accompanying the still-low laughter. "Please, God," Virgil whispered, feeling like nothing more than a frightened child trapped in a nightmare.
"This!" the man's gravelly voice ground out, raising his right hand and wiggling the fingers and razor blades in the air. "Is God!"
Virgil turned and ran.
He hadn't gotten more than a few steps when he bumped – literally – into Freddy, who'd suddenly gone from chasing him to being right there. Virg let out a yelp and turned to run back the other direction. Then he bolted through a nearby open gate into someone's backyard, only to find the creep mere steps behind him. He stared in shock as Freddy, now with no razor blade glove on his left hand, use the razors on his right to cut his fingers off.
The guy was fucking nuts!
Virg turned toward the house with the intent of making it through the back door, but Freddy caught him and wrestled him to the ground. Virgil reached up to grab his face in the struggle and what seemed to be a mask came off in his hand...revealing eyeballs glaring at him from a white-bone bloody skull. The skull face laughed maniacally, and then somehow Virgil was covered by a fluffy blue blanket. All he could do was struggle as Freddy continued laughing and pinning him down, looking like he was more than ready to use those razor blade fingernails...all ten of which were now back in place.
Virgil knew he was screaming. And he didn't care. His last thought was that he knew who the guy was, from the photos Gordon had shown him, but that this was no damn hologram. Not that it mattered, he realized, as the first razor blade sliced into him.
S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S
At first, Scott was just annoyed. He'd been trying to raise Virgil on his wristwatch since Gordon advised Virg had gone to bed ten minutes earlier. There's no way even Virgil could've gotten to his room from the lab and gone to sleep that quickly. But Virg wasn't answering his comm and since the locator told him the watch was in Virgil's bedroom suite, that's where Scott headed at a rapid gait.
What happened next turned Scott's annoyance to a mixture of confusion and concern. For when he pressed his thumb on the keypad next to Virgil's bedroom door, the door didn't budge. In fact, the keypad didn't even light up or give the customary soft beep it usually gave to announce that it had read and approved the thumbprint's owner for entry.
Scott frowned and tried again. Nothing. So he keyed in Virgil's code which, of course, he knew. Still nothing. Then the universal override code. Nothing. What the hell was going on all of a sudden with the island's equipment? First the damn movie projectors and now the door locks?
All-out scowling now, Scott lifted his wristwatch to his face. "Scott calling Brains, come in, Brains."
No response. Scott got a good look at his watch. It appeared normal. "Scott calling Gordon. Come in."
Nope.
"The fuck?" Scott groused. He looked up at the keypad, startled to note it had lit up all on its own, and as though he still had his thumb against the print-read square, announced the entrant as him and allowed the door to swish open.
Stalking through the outer sitting room of Virgil's bedroom suite, Scott suddenly stopped at a sight he couldn't hope to explain. "Virgil?" he breathed.
There Virgil was, spread-eagle on his bed, looking like he was being bounced around yet somehow still held in place. The tee shirt he'd been wearing all day and into the night suddenly ripped open right down the middle, exposing Virgil's entire chest and abdomen. Before Scott could even leap into action, four perfectly-spaced slice marks suddenly appeared top to bottom as though Virgil were actually at that very moment being cut by four razor-sharp knives.
"Virgil!" Scott cried out, taking the remaining distance between the sitting room and Virgil's bed in four long strides.
Virgil yelled out in pain, hands moving to cover the cuts, blood pouring out of them. Yet Virgil didn't even look awake to Scott. He looked like...like he was having a nightmare. Only this...it wasn't just any nightmare.
Scott reached out to make a grab for Virgil's arm but without warning, Virgil was lifted into the air head-level with Scott, and started spinning around, crying out and screaming in pain and what sounded like terror. As Virgil's legs swung his way, they hit Scott so hard he flew across the room, slamming into the wall. Hanging artwork clattered to the floor. Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, Scott looked up to find Virgil being thrown into the far corner of the room.
Scrambling to his feet, Scott ran toward his brother, only to suddenly have Virgil start being dragged upside-down, up the wall, then onto the ceiling, dragged across as though the ceiling were the floor instead. Scott jumped into the air, trying to grab at the tattered tee hanging from Virgil's body, but it was just out of reach.
"Virgil!" he yelled, hit the SOS button on his watch and then tried grabbing for him again as he got dragged along the ceiling to the middle of the bedroom, directly over the bed. Virg was rolling around on the ceiling, still screaming bloody murder, and then suddenly dropped to the bed like a stone. When he hit the mattress, it made a splashing sound, and buckets of blood spattered outward, covering Scott and most of the bedroom.
As Virgil bounced up from the bed, Scott lunged forward and tackled him to it before he could bounce right off onto the floor. The combined motion made both of them bounce wildly for a few seconds, and it was in those few seconds Scott realized his brother had gone silent.
What Scott didn't realize was that they weren't alone in the room anymore. He was too busy yelling Virgil's name and trying to understand what he'd just seen to hear the soft "Ch ch ch ha ha ha" coming from behind him. Too busy slipping and sliding in all the blood covering Virgil's half-naked body, trying to get a look at his face to see if his eyes were open, trying to figure out in the mess if he was breathing, to notice the large shadow that suddenly loomed over him.
It was the next sound, which Scott couldn't really identify other than to know it was out of place, that caught his attention. He turned his head toward it, directly behind him, and had just enough time to register a battered-looking hockey mask when a huge machete was plunged into the center of his back.
He felt his legs go numb as his head fell onto his brother's shoulder. In those few moments of silence as blood and life leaked from Scott's body, he knew Virgil wasn't breathing. Soon, neither was he.
S – L – A – S – H – E – R – S
Alan was beet red from anger and frustration and not being able to get into Tin-Tin's bedroom when suddenly the keypad to the right of her door bleeped on and allowed him access. The door swished open, Alan nearly falling flat on his face when it gave beneath his left hand. He managed to keep his feet beneath him, but when he passed the sitting room and got into Tin-Tin's bedroom proper, he frowned. Because she wasn't in bed, and not only that, her nightshirt was on the floor nearby.
That's when it registered that the shower was running. "Tin-Tin?" he called out, making his way across the room to the bathroom door. Somewhere in the distance, it seemed like very far away, another voice filtered through to him.
"Mother! Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!"
Alan's head whipped around toward the voice, which seemed to be coming from the closed sliding glass door, then he turned back to the bathroom. "Tin-Tin?"
There was no sound but the running shower, so he pushed the door all the way open and was man enough to admit the sound he made was something between a shriek and a scream. For there lay Tin-Tin half-in and half-out of the tub, left cheek against the hard tile floor, and one of the shower doors half off its track.
"Tin-Tin! Oh, my God!" Alan cried, falling to his knees next to her. But he knew without even touching her that she was gone. The one eye he could see was wide open but lifeless. Hot water dripped down the length of her back toward her neck, with her butt and legs being beat on directly by the shower.
When Al looked over the edge of the tub, he saw bright red blood rushing along with the water and spiraling down the drain. "Oh, my God," he breathed, tears filling his eyes and spilling down his cheeks. He began sobbing as he tried lifting her wet, slippery body up to get her out of the tub, but in his grief and disbelief he lost his grip and her face hit the floor again with a dull thud.
Then Al heard a groan. A groan that didn't quite sound human.
Alan whirled, slipping a little on the water that had splashed on the bathroom floor. He didn't see anything at first in the moonlight coming through the sliding glass doors, but again a low moan came to his ears, making goosebumps rise on his skin and the hair at the nape of his neck stand on end.
Cautiously he made his way out of the bathroom back into Tin-Tin's bedroom, and that's when he saw something that was completely impossible to be seeing. He'd know what it was anywhere, and that was the problem. It wasn't real.
And yet, it was.
"Jesus Christ," Alan whispered as the thing towered over him. Its skin was gray and death-like, its hair dirty-looking and disheveled. It had what looked like big corks sticking out either side of its neck and empty eyes stared at him from a large face with a too-large forehead. Alan backed away from the bathroom door until he hit the wall, and then thought to hit the SOS on his watch as the creature took slow lumbering steps toward him, its arms outstretched.
Alan could see the stitch marks on its neck, its head. It stood a good seven feet tall and was as wide as two Virgils standing next to each other. Al tried getting all the way to the wall, but fell over boxes that Tin-Tin had recently received from storage on the mainland, and was currently in the process of going through.
Well...had been in the process.
The creature...Frankenstein's monster, there was no doubt...advanced on Alan, groaning like it was in pain as it came nearer...nearer.
Why wasn't anyone coming to Alan's aid? He'd hit the SOS. He slapped it again for good measure. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere except, if he could get the sliding glass doors open in time, the balcony. But then where? It was at least sixty feet from Tin-Tin's balcony to the ledge on the montainside below it, and even Alan couldn't make that kind of a fall without breaking something.
But he had to chance it, or face whatever it was this monster intended for him.
As Alan scrambled over the mess of boxes and their contents, he felt the monster's hand reach out and brush against his hair. Sweat broke out on Al's upper lip. It beaded up at his sideburns and started trickling down his neck. His tee shirt dampened at the armpits and between his shoulder blades. He had nothing at all on his mind but escaping Tin-Tin's room.
Only the latch on the sliding glass door was stuck. He fought with it for a handful of seconds before turning to see where the monster was. But it was too late. The monster was there. In a flash his large hands were around Alan's throat. Al grabbed the thing's wrists and tried to pull them away, but the creature was too strong...his hands simply wouldn't budge!
"No," Alan croaked as his airway began collapsing under the superhuman grip. Al tried kicking, tried wiggling, squirming, wrenching himself out of the monster's grasp...all to no avail. The more he moved, the faster his windpipe was crushed. He saw his vision narrow to mere pinpoints of light, the garish face of Frankenstein's monster the very last thing he would ever see.