Page 355 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

Reel Love by Maren Smith

Chapter One

Audrey flopped two body pillows and a huge floral quilt on the hardwood flooring in front of the entertainment center. She ran down her mental list of preparedness. Fire crackling in the fireplace? Check. Huge bowl of heavily buttered and salted popcorn? Check. Half-gallon container of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, with a bottle of Magic-Shell chocolate topping? Check. And finally, a two-quart plastic bottle of Diet Coke, which had just come out of the freezer and was chilled into a perfect state of half-ice and half-liquidness? Double check. She wasn’t even going to use a glass. No, sir. Tonight, she was swigging straight from the bottle. Tonight was about decadence. It was about self-indulgence. It was about starting her three-day weekend, God-am-I-glad-to-be-off-work, and too-bad-I-don’t-have-a-boyfriend-right-now vacation.

Not that she needed a boyfriend to have fun. Nope. Audrey plopped down on her pillows, the ice cream and Magic-Shell to her right, the popcorn and Diet Coke well within reach on the left. She rubbed her hands gleefully, ready to have fun all on her own.

Audrey bent towards the coffee table at her feet and pulled the short stack of video tapes closer. They were six of the most god-awful B-flick monster movies that she owned—Roger Corman notwithstanding. There was Attack of the Eye Creature, The Thing That Couldn’t Die, The Giant Gila Monster, Attack of the Giant Leeches, The Spider Feeds!, and her all-time favorite, It Conquered the Earth.

Outside there was a low rumble of thunder as spring decided to announce the growing season with a good hard rain storm. Audrey raised her head as a flurry of rain drops pelted the roof and windows. What a perfect night for a monster movie marathon. Now, for the perfect atmosphere…

She got up to shut off all the lights, casting her living room into cave-like darkness with flickering, demonic shadows that moved upon the walls to the whim of the dancing fire. She returned to her pillows on the floor and swaddled herself in her warm, comforting and monster-under-the-bed-proof rose quilt.

Awash in the blue glow of the blank tv screen, she agonized over what to watch first. Unable to decide, she finally closed her eyes and Eenie Meenie Minie Moed herself into sticking The Giant Gila Monster into the DVD player.

A flash of lightening briefly washed the room in an eerie, flickering light, but then the whir of the DVD player caught her attention and the blank blue screen was replaced by the start of the movie. She swigged a long drink from the Coke bottle, crunched contentedly on little crystals of Diet Coke ice, and reached for the ice cream and magic shell.

It’d take two weeks on the treadmill to recover from the cottage cheese thighs she was planning on developing tonight, but she still didn’t care. Every nerve in her body came to life as she caught her first glimpse of the dreaded gila. She shivered into her ice cream just before it took its first two victims, and scooted up closer to the TV as the monster, through badly choreographed implication, derailed a train and made a smorgasbord of the riders. Her muscles jerked with the explosion as Chase, the hero of the day, who sings whenever he sings whenever he sings whenever he sings, drove his car into the gigantic lizard. He destroyed the beast in the end, saving all of Texas.

As she ejected the DVD from the machine and bent down to select the next movie, a sudden strobe-like flash of lightning and a glass-rattling boom had her glancing over her shoulder at the nearest window. The rain beating against the house intensified, and Audrey frowned. She didn’t really care how hard it rained, just so long as the power didn’t go out and ruin her whole weekend.

She slid the blood-red cardboard cover off the video she’d seen the least, The Spider Feeds! Just as she was placing the DVD in the mouth of the player, another flickering strobe of blue-grey light lit up the inside of her house. Audrey felt the jolt and smelled the burning ozone as a line of blue electricity exploded out of the entertainment center in a shower of sparks and burning plastic.

Let go of the machine! her brain screamed, but it was already too late. The current shot into her fingers, up her arm and for a moment, it felt as though she’d put her entire body in a light socket.

The next thing Audrey knew, her living room vanished and suddenly she was behind the wheel of a truck. A big truck. Old, with no suspension, she realized as she bounced along the unpaved road at what had to be no more than thirty miles an hour. It was hard to tell really, since the inside of the dash was entirely unlit and only one headlight on the driver’s side illuminated the quickly passing wooded landscape to either side of her.

“What the hell?” she said.

The truck hit a rut and Audrey grabbed the wheel as the vehicle bounced precariously out of the center of the narrow road and headed for the trees. There was also no power steering, and she had to crank the wheel hard to get the truck back on the road, accidentally overcorrecting. The back half of the unfamiliar vehicle fish-tailed on the gravel, and Audrey screamed, yanking on the steering column to keep from driving clean off the road and crashing into the woods. Her feet stomped the floor, searching for the brakes and finding the clutch instead, and—oh my God—it was a manual drive!

The truck swerved wildly back towards the road, and she screamed again as she pulled the wheel back to the right. The vehicle came grudgingly back under control, and once more she found herself following that unpaved road in an unfamiliar truck, wide-eyed and panting, one foot still stomping for the brakes, although with a little less panic now that she was no longer fish-tailing.

Right up until a hairy, eight-legged, six-foot-high spider dashed across the road right in front of her single headlight. Audrey panicked all over again, both feet finding the brake at the same time. There could not have been a worse moment to stop the truck, and yet she could not get her body to react as fast as her brain. Gravel flew as the wheels skidded right off the road and she crashed head-on into the thick trunk of a monster pine.

The one headlight shattered, the motor died in a billow of smoke, the radiator hissed steam, and Audrey sat frozen in the sudden silence and stillness, clutching the steering wheel in both white-knuckled hands. She panted raggedly. Was she hurt? She looked down at herself. Despite the lack of a seatbelt, no. She didn’t seem to be.

Suddenly it felt as though she were breathing in a vacuum. The whitest brightest light exploded all around her, blinding her for the barest second. Then the brightness simply disappeared, replaced by dull, flashing lights that rhythmically splashed up against the tree trunk before her and illuminated the grayness of the interior of the truck from behind.

Still gripping the steering wheel, dread creeping up her spine, Audrey turned around to see a black fifties-style police car with grey and white lights rotating on the roof. Grey and white? Audrey looked at the lights, at the cars, at the policemen conversing with one another back on the road, then down at her hands. Everything was in black and white, including herself. Not even her fingernails, which she’d painstakingly painted red just that afternoon.

What the hell was going on? Where was her living room?

Where was she?

More importantly, where the hell was that spider?

She leaned over the steering wheel, searching the surrounding woods through the cracked windshield for anything that looked even remotely arachnid-ish.

Tap-tap-tap!

She turned to look out the driver’s window. A black and white, boyishly-faced, thirty-something man stood grinning back at her. He might have been blond, considering the lightness of his hair.

“Hello there.” He smiled cheerfully. “How you doing? You hurt?”

Audrey didn’t say a word.

He glanced back at the police officers, gave a wave, then grinned at her. He beckoned with two fingers. “Come on out of the truck.”

---