Midnight Special by Phoef Sutton

backseat, where he could just glimpse the squirming maggots in his eye if he leaned forward. They hadn’t spread any. Flint seemed to be maintaining himself. For now.
    That was one of the reasons Matt had agreed to go with them to the movie. The other was that he sensed that there was more to Barnabas’s insistence on holding the screening tomorrow night than sheer mischievousness. Barnabas knew more about Mr. Dark than he let on. Matt wanted to stay near Barnabas and see what made him tick.
    But that didn’t explain why Eva changed her mind and decided to come along. Or why she was sitting so near to him, drumming her black fingernails on his thigh. Hadn’t Matt made his lack of interest clear?
    He had asked to drop by his hotel room on the way and pick up his duffel bag, his ax waiting inside it. Why he wanted it close to him, he wasn’t sure. He was just used to having it there, and in the small towns and on the back roads he usually frequented, no one questioned a man carrying a large duffel slung over his shoulder. In a big city it made him stand out like a homeless person.
    Which was what he was, he supposed.
    He missed Harrisonburg. He’d picked up the room phone in his hotel and called Gina, but all he’d got was her voice mail. He hadn’t left a message. He was never sure what to say on those things. “How are you?” “I’m here.” “I miss you.” It all seemed so forced.
    So here he was, driving in a cherry red hearse toward the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to see a zombie movie, with a girl with bleached blond hair and a pierced eyebrow who wanted to fuck him, and a forty-year-old teenager who was now playing Wanda Jackson’s “Riot in Cell Block #9” at full volume, as the hearse vibrated with bass, motoring down the street.
    Matt decided he didn’t like LA.
    After he’d been to New York a few months back, he’d thought all big cities would be the same. But whereas New York crushed you down by the sheer weight of the buildings or the cacophonous noise of the traffic, Los Angeles was all spread out and nondescript and anonymous. It was as if a small Western town had grown and grown, like the Blob, and was threatening to eat up the entire country if it wasn’t stopped.
    Matt could see no pedestrians on the sidewalk, just empty nail salons and auto repair shops. Then all at once there was a throng of people, all twentysomething (or people on either side of their twenties who wished they were twentysomething), lined up outside the gates of an old cemetery, which sprang up out of nowhere between a transmission/muffler shop and a Chinese restaurant.
    Flint steered the hearse into the crowd, easing his way through the gates. The mob parted with well-rehearsed ease, and they drove into the cemetery. Barnabas rolled down his window and waved to the multitude—they all waved back with the respect and devotion of a congregation for its pastor.
    Matt took a closer look at the crowd and his heart skipped a beat.
    They were all rotting and covered with running sores.
    It took him a second to realize that they were wearing makeup. This was a costume event. Everyone was made up as zombies.
    Great ,thought Matt. Now it would be hard to tell the fake ghouls from the real ones. But Matt figured, after all he’d been through, he’d be up for the job.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    The cemetery was huge. Behind white walls, secreted from the city that pulsed all around it, the cemetery lay like a sleeping giant. Acres of tombstones and marble statues. Palm trees, looking to Matt like alien fingers scratching at the night sky, towered overhead among the clouds and fingered the stars.
    It wasn’t a modern cemetery. It didn’t have concrete slabs flush with the ground to make it easier to mow the lawn. No, this was an old-fashioned, full-on graveyard , filled with monuments and mausoleums and statues of weeping angels. It looked for all the world like a cemetery movie set. It was even lit like a film—low arcs of light