Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) Read Free Page B

life and death I’d become accustomed to.
    With a feeling of dejection and a sense I should do something, I flipped through Prescott’s book. What could be so great that it had capitalist rivetheads mingling with strange old ladies and knife-wielding maniacs? Despite my aversion to horror, I turned to page one and began to read.
    It opened like an eighties slasher movie: college cheerleading squad en route to a competition, forced to detour through a creepy town filled with religious fanatics. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, shockingly, surprisingly, their bus breaks down in the middle of town, and the only mechanic in a hundred miles is a limping leering inbreedy guy. He offers to fix it if they’re willing to “pay the price.” Which, of course, they agree to pay—anything to get them back on the road the next day so they could make it in time for the competition.
    I saw it coming a mile away. I wanted to shout at Rhonda, the head cheerleader who was secretly a lesbian, to stay out of the shower, but she wouldn’t have listened. When it comes to taking showers alone in strange old hotels, cheerleaders are like moths to a bug zapper. Rhonda got in the shower, blood shot out of the showerhead, she screamed, and then she ran out. Or she tried to—the door wouldn’t open.
    The same thing happened to the rest of the showering, weed-smoking, boy-crazy cheerleading team, and all of them got locked in their rooms just like poor blood-soaked Rhonda.
    By around the third naked cheerleader, I was getting into the story. Prescott, for all the clichés he was tossing around, had an engaging way with words, and his characters were funny or sad or human in all the right ways.
    The story took an even darker turn when the doors to each room proceeded to open, one at a time, and that’s when I got my first taste of what made Prescott such a popular horror novelist.
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    V eronica entered the dimly lit ballroom gripping the knife in front of her, desperately trying to remember she was the co-Captain and not some spineless freshman flinching through basket tosses and hurting people.
    Suddenly the overhead lights came on, momentarily blinding her. When her vision cleared, she saw them. Unlike the other rooms she’d tried on that floor, hoping to find the girls so they could escape, this one had been unlocked. Now she knew why: the ballroom was filled with people.
    There was a woman with red hair wearing a nurse’s outfit, standing stiffly with her arms at her sides. Veronica’s eyes widened and she stifled a scream. The woman’s face looked to have been removed and then stitched back onto her skull. Except … no, that didn’t make sense. The photograph displayed on the easel next to her had the same red hair, but the face was different. A caption under the photograph read, “Vice.”
    A few feet away, the mystery of the missing face was cleared up when Veronica saw it stitched on another woman. Beside that corpse was a portrait captioned, “Versa.”
    Two women with their faces removed and switched. Vice Versa.
    Veronica began to cry. She couldn’t go back the way she’d come. The manager was out there with his suped-up cattle prod and electrified body armor. She needed to keep moving, but he’d strung a twisting pathway of razor wire through the room. From each jagged steel blade, a sinister unknown substance glistened, daring her to try and slip past.
    Corralled by the deadly barrier and unable to turn back, Veronica moved forward through a parade of people preserved through taxidermy. They were all female, their faces masks of the terror they’d experienced before death.
    Each woman was propped and positioned to awful effect:
    A young woman with her musculature removed, turning her into a human stick figure with a normal-sized head. Her title read, “Bug.”
    An older woman suspended by a wire, her legs and arms sewn to her stomach so that they hung down. This one was titled, “Florero.”
    Another woman had been