Free Dark Advent by Brian Hodge

trade them in for favorite clothes when they get older.
    She relaxed more when she was out in her car, rolling south on Bellefontaine out of Spanish Lake and into St. Louis, the nonstop talk on KMOX forgone in favor of some jazz on a station she didn’t know. But that music was just what the doctor ordered. Immersion in the city, which, like New York, never truly slept, made her feel anonymous. Fine by her. Now she was just like everybody else.
    Normal.
    She cruised until she found a theater playing an all-night string of horror films. At this time of night, it seemed that the only marathon showings were of horror flicks or triple-X epics. She had no objection to the latter, but alone and at this hour, she’d probably be better off with the gore.
    The theater held a sparse population of other insomniacs, mostly solo or paired off with one other fellow zombie. Erika’s sandals met with faint resistance every time she tried to pull them from the tacky floor, until she settled in a seat that had seen better days before it had seen the business end of someone’s knife. She came in on the beginning of a gruesome little movie called The Hills Have Eyes, mean-spirited but engrossing nonetheless. The next movie followed shortly after three…one of those old Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, this one The Masque of the Red Death.
    To a girl who had seen as many movies as Erika, the old sets of this film seemed so contrived, so out of date. So tacky. But she found it fascinating the way Vincent Price and the rest of his partying fools had decked themselves out in their gaudiest clothes, spitting in the face of Fate, until…
    … the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
    Erika watched, dumbstruck, as they began the Dance of Death, and a woman draped in all her finery was streaked with scarlet stains popping out across her skin.
    Déjà vu.
    purplish blotches massing on her face and arms
    In an instant she knew what her dream had meant. What was to come, if it wasn’t already walking among them all, a truth more terrible and more agonizing than any fiction had ever dreamt of being.
    Erika fled the theater, barely able to hold back the tears until she’d reached her car.

8
    Some thirty-eight hours after an eleven-year-old named Chuck had met the worst bogeyman of his old childhood fears, and Erika Jennings awoke to oppressive darkness in her bedroom, Jason got mugged at a locale somewhere between the two of them.
    It was June twenty-fifth, the last Thursday of the month, and it started out innocently enough, if not quite normal. Upon arrival at work , Jason was informed by Kelly about a truckers’ strike in St. Louis that had left a shipment of suits and rental tuxes stranded at the wholesaler with no way of moving east of the river on their own. Would Jason be interested in finding a little something extra in his next paycheck for cruising over in the store van and hauling them back? Is the Pope Catholic?
    Kelly warned him that he’d likely have a little layover time, since a number of other stores were probably doing the same thing.
    “So what should I do in the meantime?” Jason asked, already loosening the tie he’d knotted ten minutes earlier.
    “Get a haircut. You’re starting to look like a sheepdog.”
    “Better than being a bald old fart like you.” Jason grinned.
    Kelly’s wholesaler was on the south side of St. Louis, within sight of I-55 as it wove south. Beyond the highway ran the Mississippi, brown and eternal. Jason found he’d have a wait of at least forty-five minutes, and so he left his van keys with a fellow who toted around a clipboard as if it were nothing less than the Ten Commandments. Jason set off on foot in search of a diner to grab a more substantial breakfast than the coffee and crunch donut he’d gulped down in his kitchen.
    As he walked a southwestern path, he tried to reconcile the city as it was now with what it had been a century and more ago, a vital cog in a