Jinx sat frozen on the steps of the stage, ominously overseeing the crowd while Sebastian laid a few yards behind him with a balled-up tablecloth under his head, napping. They could hear his slight snore leaking through the PA system via the mini-mic clipped to his collar. The crazed groom was truly savoring every single moment of it, planned intermissions included.
Taylor sat a short distance away at the table closest to the stage beside her headless brother who no longer remained handcuffed to his chair. They’d piled his annihilated corpse in front of her and left the ruined bodies of her parents beside him to comprise the remainder of the gory pile.
She could have never imagined her special day would be this special. The magical evening would be quite memorable, but for all the wrong reasons…
That fucking bastard. I should have never even given him the time of day! I gave him the best days—no, MONTHS—of my life! I wish I had known it was gonna be over sooner… I would’ve taken more pictures, made more posts, worked a little harder for those likes. I didn’t leave enough to make a real impression, I’m just another pretty face. They’ll never remember me for the good things now! I’ll always be that girl that got murdered on her wedding day with a bunch of fucking nobodies… Taylor thought to herself somberly.
Suddenly, it dawned on her. Taylor’s heart started to race with a newfound hope. Maybe they’ll make a 20/20 or Dateline about me?!
After the conveyer belt of vanity produced almost any self-centered ponderance imaginable, she began to think more rationally; the gun! I want to fucking kill him so bad! But Dad’s right in front of me… No, it would be too obvious if I just started searching him in front of everyone. Actually, there are way too many people still alive anyway. I’m gonna need to wait for the numbers to dwindle a little bit more before I make my move. I’m the bride, he’s gotta keep me around a little while longer at least. There’s no way he’s gonna kill me before the rest of the nobodies. Surely, he would have done it already. I just have to keep waiting for the right opportunity…
In the distance, what remained of Sebastian’s family looked on. Hana hadn’t said a word since she’d seen her son send a barrage of bullets into her husband, leaving him crumpled against the elegant wall of the Biltmore. She simply sat still as a mannequin with her wide eyes but in a state of shutdown.
Uncle Ivan attempted to keep the ladies calm as best he could. His wife, Olga, and daughter, Nina, had been justifiably hysterical for some time. He was grateful they hadn’t made a scene because, aside from the faint oddly romantic background music that DJ Buttaz had been forced to play, you could hear a pin drop.
He draped his jacket over his brother’s destroyed expression in an attempt to remove some of the crippling horror they were all surrounded by. Thankfully, Olga and Nina’s seats were facing the wall so they didn’t have to look at the dancefloor that looked more like the murder room inside of a slaughterhouse.
“What have you done, Sebastian?” Uncle Ivan whispered to himself.
“We are all going to die!” Olga wept.
Nina’s sniffle started to accelerate. Her heavy breathing left her body inflating and deflating like a blow-up pool float.
“Shhhh!” Ivan put his finger up to his lips. “You must stay calm.”
“Save us, Ivan, you must do something!”
“What? What must I do? The boy is lost, I don’t know how to fix him.”
“I will not sit around and wait for death!”
“Olga, calm yourself, please. For Nina.”
She had almost entirely forgotten about her petrified daughter sitting beside her. The survival instincts had blinded her, all Olga could think about was saving her own hide from the pulverizing end that she’d seen so many others come to find.
Olga looked into Nina’s tear-squirting eyes and rubbed her back gently. Then shifted her gaze back to her husband.
“What will we do?” she begged the question.
“I know you are scared, I am as well. There is no escape, he has seen to that. Only option is reason with him, or overthrow him. But I don’t see how this is possible…”
Uncle Ivan was being as realistic as he could. He’d gone through the scenarios in his head over and over. There was no easy out. As he watched his sick nephew go on for hours, tearing friends and family limb from limb, he couldn’t help but feel an overall feeling of impending doom crushing him.
“I know you don’t like answer, but we must wait. If I get chance to stop him, I will,” Ivan promised.
“Daddy, I don’t want to be hurt like those other people,” Nina wailed.
“I know, baby, I know. I love you, sweet pea, and know that Papa will protect you,” Ivan replied in a shaken tone that couldn’t sound less empty of confidence.
“That’s right, you have nothing to worry about,” Olga mumbled on the verge of tears, trying to reaffirm for the poor girl.
Ivan turned to the side and back to Hana who was still as stoic as ever. “Hana,” he whispered, trying to get her to snap out of her funk. “Hana, can you hear me?”
Her lack of response remained firmly in place. Hana’s thousand-yard stare offered no gateway to her thought process. In a way, it was probably for the best. Ivan was trying to check her coherence but had absolutely no idea what he could possibly say to her anyway.
Paula and Cindy sat back at their table looking a bit out of place amongst the other terrified guests. They had already been involved in the nasty celebratory “events” and were speckled and smeared in the bodily discharges of other participants.
They looked like hell because they’d gone through it. The horrid impacts would be infinite as showcased by the grim mood that was currently weighing them down. The girls had found a new plane of existence—one of utter ugly silence.
They had become warped backwards-world doppelgängers of their prior exuberance. They were still the same people that they’d always been, but now they projected the exact opposite emotion that had accompanied them to the party. Their cheerful, gossipy, fun-loving personas had been swapped out for a vibe of utter bleakness. There were no words that could’ve described their domineering dread.
In the bathroom, Lucas’s stomach was still giving him issues. But the piercing stabs jabbing his abs were the least of his problems. Amid the sounds of mayhem, he’d finally found the courage to slither out from beneath the sink.
After scavenging the closet for something to protect himself with, he realized that there was no protecting himself. Hand soap and tissue weren’t exactly viable weapons, even MacGyver wouldn’t know what the fuck to do with that horseshit.
“C’mon, think! Think!” he said to himself.
He pulled the door open with impeccable caution, giving himself a minute sliver of window into the depravity he’d been imagining based on the sound effects echoing throughout the ballroom for the last few hours.
He could see Sebastian looking like a first-grader during nap time and the psycho jester watching over the flock of nervous survivors.
Lucas looked down at his dead cell phone that, on any other day, would have been the key to his escape. But on that cursed day, it was just a useless wad of alloy and circuitry. He gently closed the door and began to quietly ramble to himself.
“Any other fucking day,” he said, slipping the inoperable device back into his front pocket. “They already searched in here… That sick fuck, Sebastian, sounded like he was prepared to die in this abortion of a wedding reception too. Maybe I can just wait them out. You just gotta wait them out, Lucas…”
Alyssa was physically shaking, so she moved her hands off of the table to avoid rattling the silverware and drawing any further attention to their table.
“What if we told him that he was in there? Maybe they would give us some kind of reward? Maybe it would be like a symbol of respect and they would let us live?” Sarah whispered, floating the idea of snitching on their coworker.
“How do you know Lucas isn’t dead already? Just because he didn’t come out of the bathroom doesn’t mean the bullets he fired didn’t go right into his fucking head,” Alyssa retorted.
“Something tells me the creepy clown would have dragged him out here to at least show-off to Sebastian. Don’t you think?”
“What kind of rat fink bitch are you, Sarah? That’s our fuckin’ friend in there and you’re ready to just sell him down the river for a what-if,” Keith scolded.
“Let’s be frank, we all know Lucas is a selfish piece of shit. You’re a goddamn sucker if you think he wouldn’t sell you out in a heartbeat, Keith.”
“Well, do you wanna talk to them? Because I sure as hell don’t. Do you really think there’s a better chance of them just letting us skip out of here merrily, or deciding that we’re just gonna be part of the next sick ritual because we decided to interact with them like fucking idiots?” Alyssa clearly hated the idea but for different reasons than Keith.
“Not only that, haven’t you seen Die Hard?” Keith interjected.
“Of course, I’ve seen fucking Die Hard, it’s a classic,” Sarah snarked.
“Do you wanna become Ellis? Because that’s the road you’re traveling down, sweetheart. Those terrorists scratched his ass out when he tried to play negotiator and these two whack-jobs seem a lot less stable than Hans Gruber.”
“So, now we’re using movies as the basis for our actions?” Sarah asked.
Alyssa slipped her hand back on top of the table and clenched the butterknife firmly.
“Keep your voice down! The fact is that drawing attention to us isn’t gonna help. I’ll tell you what, let me end the debate now. If you say one word, one fucking syllable that draws those maniacs over to our table, I’ll find a way to force this flat tip through that precious neck of yours before you can even worry about trying to save it.”
Keith was taken aback by Alyssa’s overall savagery. He’d never seen her act so bold and sure about anything. It both scared and excited him.
“Do you understand me?” she asked, subtly pointing the silver at Sarah.
She watched Sarah nod her head, although it was obvious that there wasn’t an inch of agreement between the two who were typically carbon copies of each other.
Alyssa exhaled a deep breath and lowered the utensil. “Good,” she said as the word trembled from her chattering lips.
What if he knows all about me and Taylor? Seems like he knows everything else. But you can’t have a party without music though, right? He needs me to some extent, I’m an asset to this sick ass game of his. At least for now I am… I need to find a way to keep it low-key and just hope I can survive a little bit longer than the rest of them, DJ Buttaz thought, looking at the still healthy number of guests sitting before his eyes.
He’d been sifting through the records for the relaxing shit, the music that might foster a tranquil atmosphere and keep his head attached to his shoulders and his guts inside his abdomen.
Happiness, romance, and slow-dance material were in a constant queue during Sebastian’s nap time. Diana Ross, Lionel Richie, Sinatra, Elvis, and Stevie Wonder. He’d already gone through most of them. Loading them up like bullets into a gun but he was starting to run out of ammo.
Repeating the tunes was where insanity started, and things were already quite insane enough. The thought of redundancy didn’t feel like a good move, but he was limited in the remaining options. He had no choice but to do what he always did and just play some fucking music.
All the faces around the table had been looking at Perry in the same way he felt like most people did throughout his life… like he was out of place. The fact that he was dressed like he was about to perform an oil change amongst the lavishly attired group didn’t really help his cause for camouflage.
They probably think I’m drawing attention to us… they’re probably right, he thought.
A short while ago, Perry tried to wipe most of the nasty jumble of gist and bone fragments off of his chair seat with his napkin. Much of the human slop had slowly slid down to the floor but the remainder of the grainy moisture had bled into the jumpsuit’s posterior and down to his underwear. It had transitioned from warm and gross to cold and clammy while starting to congeal against him.
Perry was still trying to figure out exactly what was going on. Being a little late to the party, he’d had the questions lined up for some time, but his anti-social tendencies and general feeling of disdain toward his presence had been holding him back. The others hadn’t said a word and it felt like someone needed to.
Fuck it, he thought.
“What happened? That guy looked so happy before…” Perry said, referencing the pleased image of the groom he’d witnessed in the hallway before everything had gone south.
A gentleman wearing a black bowtie looked at him, “In case you haven’t noticed, he’s gone mad. He’s executing an incredibly thoughtful plan to exterminate all of us, or just about everyone… so he says.”
“Why?”
“Apparently, it’s the only goal he ever had in life. To kill as many people, as agonizingly slowly as anyone possibly could.”
“Jesus…” Perry whispered, still in awe by the totality of the unsavory event.
“Never believed in him myself, but I think you’re right. Only he can save us now…”
Perry racked his brain for an answer or any kind of direction. He wasn’t really asking the man in the bowtie a question but it came out that way. “Where the hell do we go from here?”
“That one with the mask took all of our phones. Did you or the other staff you came in with, God rest their souls, have one?”
“No, he took all of ours too,” Perry replied.
“So, they’ve put all of our contact with the outside world,” the man paused, almost not believing what he was about to say, “they put it in that dunk tank filled with acid…”
The man glanced at them then back at Perry, “Now, it’s just them and us. And make no mistake about it, they’re in control.”
“I see the gun, but we have them outnumbered, couldn’t we just bum rush them?”
“Sure, you first,” he replied smugly. “It’s not just the machine gun, you see that,” he pointed toward the enormous bomb on the bloody dancefloor.
Perry looked back slowly, and from the corner of his eye, he keyed in on it. The fat fluid tubes, the metallic infrastructure, and a jumble of multi-colored wires galore. It didn’t take an explosives expert to understand what it was.
“He did a small-scale demonstration for us earlier,” he continued, subtly pointing toward the destroyed table and human scramble of gore and extremities that was the children’s table. “So, I’m guessing that one’s the real deal. He’s got it all triggered by a hand-activated control.”
Perry’s vision couldn’t leave the face (or lack thereof) that was skinned down to the bone on one of the children. The exposed gums and teeth grinned back at him morbidly, leaving the tired old custodian unsure what to say next.
The steroid stable of fitness fanatics had been quiet for some time now. The earlier debates had died down and they all seemed to be waiting in angst for whatever came next. Whatever it was, they knew it wasn’t going to be for the faint of heart.
“I can’t believe we’re gonna die here, all because of some bitch,” Kwan said, holding back the same tears and whine for over an hour now.
“Of all the pussy in the entire world, we had to pick her,” Luke mumbled in agreement.
“If this was only a fair fight, we’d mash that punk, Sebastian, and his goofy buddy,” Rocky chimed in.
Brick remained mum, staring at Sebastian who was still laying on the stage but finally starting to awaken after his beauty sleep.
If what Rocky just suggested had the possibility of manifesting into reality, they would have all gladly accepted the challenge. What they didn’t know was that, very soon, they were in fact about to get a shot at an impartial battle without fear of outside interference. Except, the opponents they’d be squaring off against weren’t Sebastian and Jinx.
