The players took their seats, tingling with apprehension. At first nobody spoke. Somewhere above on another floor, the boards creaked.
Pat sucked in a breath. He was loathe to end the silence (or begin the pain), but even more he feared what he might become. I must ask, he thought.
“Um… Will we…” but he let the words hang. Could he finish the critical question?
“What was that?” Dan did not look up from his scribbled notes.
Pat breathed out slowly, could feel his heart pulsing behind his ears and blinked when his eyes began to mist. He caught a glance of Mike staring back at him (mouth opened slack, exposing terrified dry tongue), noticed Drew hiding face behind clenched fists and dripping palms, felt the spinal chill as Palmer raised his eyebrows above an otherwise wooden gaze.
Only Rich seemed happy to be there, and he turned to grin and cheerily request refreshment. “Got any Baja Blastitos my good man?”
Pat’s fingers began to ache and he looked down to observe his pencil had been splintered in his compressed fist.
I’ll just ask. Do it. Now. We have to know.
“Any questions before we begin?” Dan raised his head at last to look at Pat with full attention and Pat sensed, in that moment, that Dan’s evil, rotten-seaweed-green eyes had ripped the covers off of his most private fears with one glance.
“Um… Will we…” Pat tried again. Again he faltered.
“Will you what?” Dan smiled, all innocence.
Snap out of it, you’re a Yale man for godsakes. What would that holy, handsome angel of a bulldog think if he saw you now? Pat took one more breath, then closed his eyes to obtain a slippery purchase on the words and he forced them out.
“Umm… Will we… Will this…” He coughed. “Will this game turn us… into… goths?”
It’s a dusty night in the City of Salt and five lives are about to be preserved… like how salt preserves dead meat. [Damn.]
It’s a dark, placid night in the city that always sleeps a sensible 7 or 8 hours… Salt Lake City, that is. [Fuck, try again.]
It’s night in Salt Lake City. [That’s it, punchy, relevant.]
It’s an ordinary night in Salt Lake but five lives are drifting toward the edge of everything they thought they knew. Monica Broadbent, sharp-suited and sharper-tongued, wraps up a late deposition, unaware that the law she serves won’t protect her from what’s coming. Across town, Terri Kimball double-checks a few final lines of chemicode inventory in her startup’s cramped lab, half-listening to a podcast about consciousness and the soul. Buck Nelson, still built like the linebacker he used to be, downs a burger and scrolls the shallow dregs of a played out dating app on his cracked phone, trying not to think about how far he’s fallen. Mark Boothe-Kearns, restless in a showroom of vintage imports, rehearses what he’ll say to his girlfriend tonight—if she even picks up. And in the quiet halls of his ancestral home, Emerson Hale III sips bourbon in a velvet chair, brooding over quarterly returns and the growing sense that his legacy is slipping away before he had a chance to build it. None of them know it yet, but before the sun rises, their world will burn—and they will wake into another nightmare entirely.
Like it or not, each of the characters encounter a bearded, vaguely eastern European-looking stranger with powerful eyes. Monica and Vince (her stalwart boy scout of a man) are taken by the bearded stranger upon returning to their condo after a night at the theater; Terri and Buck divert themselves beating down a fratty loudmouth in a grimy basement bar/sushi restaurant before their memories go blank in the parking lot; Mark is late for a date with Jenny, but his road to love is blocked by a not-so-clever ruse, and Emerson… well he simply disappears from his posh den while contemplating high-finance.
The characters awake in the dark. Monica especially notes how painfully Vince’s struck matches impact her vision. After getting their bearings and discovering their apparent captivity in a b-movie medical torture dungeon, they discover three bodies, two hapless bystanders and one delicious husband. The sound of heartbeats is maddening. The smell of gum is sickening. Whatever could be happening here?
Thoughts are difficult to wrangle for most of the characters—there is a madness and an unfillable hole of hunger obfuscating their sense of humanity. Everything feels edgy, borrowed. Loveable dummy Vince tries to get everyone to calm down, and the steel hatch door is scalding to the touch. Emerson very sensibly pushes Vince to back off, but years of golf (and probably polo or something) have apparently blessed Emerson with unknown strength and the push takes him down. Vince’s cracked head and the smell of blood provokes Mark and Buck to… rehydrate.
As they desperately seek a way out of the brick lined lab cell, the hunger becomes too great for most. Little Tessa Jackson seeks comfort from Terri, but ends up drained of lifeforce. Her mother Ellen makes a similar mistake with Monica. Only Emerson is able to control his inhuman urges.
Most are horrified, they sense they’re in a dream. But Mark, learned occult scholar that he is, realizes what has happened. “Guys? I think we’re probably some sort of super awesome vampire super-heroes now?”
The team finds renewed strength and something like hope, which pair fantastically with a weak wall and ancient boiler service tunnels beyond (which they barely even TRIED to explore, cause they were too horrified and running for their lives). After splitting up briefly they emerge in a med-tech office campus area and talk to passersby about the nearby fire. Terri seems to have a special connection with a local dog (unwittingly saving the life of a perfectly good human lady).
The characters, all very convinced of their new status as heretofore mythical entities, retreat to Emerson’s home to enjoy Windsor the butler’s famous hospitality and discretion. Emerson may be famished, but he’s still a gentleman. Nobody will miss a couple local raccoons.
Their ordeal has exhausted them—falling asleep feels like drifting across the veil into death and they are powerless to stay awake.
