Sunless Cinema [COMPLETE]

IV: Confrontation

"Oh my god," Ralph whispered. 

Teddy tried his hardest to keep his voice down. "I told you!" 

The two of them were standing outside the door of the costume storage room. Teddy could see inside, through the cracked door; Lemoine was bent over a man in suspenders, sucking at his open chest. The man-- some sort of costuming director-- stared back at the two of them with glassy eyes. 

"Holy shit. We made a mistake." Ralph's hissing whisper shook as he watched. "We made a huge fucking mistake." 

"Yeah, I know." 

"We have to fix it." 

"I know, Ralph!" 

"Keep your voice down," Ralph demanded. Something about his voice made Teddy want to straighten up like a soldier. It was all the years of authority that Ralph had over him, maybe, or that fact that Ralph was like a second father to him. (His first one wasn't exactly the best. Lemoine wasn't wrong about that.) Ralph reached into the pocket of his vest and pulled out one of his handguns. "Let's get this over with and get out alive, yeah?" 

Teddy nodded. "Yeah." 

"On three?" 

Teddy nodded again. 

"Three... Two... One..." Ralph kicked in the door, simultaneously amplifying and obscuring the sound of Lemoine glutting on the corpse. 

She turned slowly, still holding the limp body of the costume director she murdered. Hanging out of her mouth were three thick black tentacles; she sucked them in, past her straight, slick teeth, and smiled uncannily at the two of them. The corpse fell to the side, all broken skin and limp limbs. The one thing she kept in her hand was his heart, which was still bloody but no longer bleeding. She squeezed it, bit into it like it was the peel of an orange, and threw it at the ground. Lemoine ground it beneath one of her dirty beige heels. 

Teddy was frozen in the doorway. It was easy, then, for her to move unnaturally fast, like a predator in her prime, and pin him to the wall just inside the room. Lemoine had him by the throat and the wrist of his left hand.  The walls shook with the force of it. Her hand around his neck was an icebox in sixty-degree weather: it was cold and he hated it. Worse than the temperature, though, was the way that her fingernails bit into his skin, drawing blood and leaving a Stygian slurry behind. 

With his free hand-- his right one, his dominant one-- he raised the gun and tried to aim it at her head. He slid it up between the two of them and leveled it toward Lemoine's face. His hands were shaking too much to pull the trigger. 

"Do it," she whispered, her voice smooth despite the visible tentacles rising in her throat and the gun at the same level as her lips. "Take the shot. You know how this ends." 

Ralph did it for him. In all the distraction and kerfuffle, he was able to sneak up behind Lemoine; he shot twice. the first his the wall next to Teddy's head. He let out a small yelp and tried to squirm away, giving Ralph a betrayed look. 

The second shot had better luck. It hit her in the shoulder. Instead of blood and bone, it seemed to connect with sand, sludge, and something unfathomably horrible. Teddy caught one glimpse of it and wanted to puke. It was as if the cosmos lived beneath her thin skin; it was as if all the stars and the aliens, in all their indifference and apathy, had finally seen him and they were not impressed. 

The bullet only seemed to make her smile harder. Her fingers tightened around his throat. They were long enough to wrap all the way around; they bent like the legs of spiders bouncing up and down in the corners of dark rooms. Black spots danced in the corners of his vision while panic overtook his limbs and adrenaline flooded his bloodstream.