Chapter 57 Theater: It Opened the Prelude to All the Slaughter

Chapter 57: The Theater: The Prelude to All the Carnage

Xincalan is in the old town district, built quite a while back. Back then, private cars weren't as common, so the theater's parking lot was pretty small—you had to fight for a spot inside. Outside the theater, other old buildings didn't have much parking either—miss the internal lot, and you'd be parking way out.

Rebecca had been burned by the parking situation before. Thanks to her heads-up, early Saturday morning, Everly, who woke up like clockwork, and Old John got up bright and early and headed to Xincalan Theater.

The theater wasn't open yet. Fortunately, Everly was there as a volunteer, and after she checked in, the guard at the door casually waved her and Old John inside.

This laid-back Black security guard told them that Susan, the art director who ran the volunteers, hadn't arrived yet. They could go in and hang out for a bit, then gather at the entrance when the meeting time came.

"Got it, thanks!"

Old John waved at the guard with a smile and, following the signs, parked the car in the lot on the east side of the theater. Sure enough, just as he'd been told, the lot was pretty shabby—maybe a hundred spots, tops, and the spaces were generally on the small side. His Wrangler took up a spot and a quarter when parked.

Too few spots, too-small spaces—the classic curse of old American parking lots.

Xincalan Theater wasn't large; it had just one performance hall, the two-story round building right across from the main gate.

Getting out of the car, the grandfather and granddaughter followed the signs, took the internal paths, and entered the waiting lobby through the small door on the east side of the performance building.

The lobby was a big semicircle with high ceilings, with different sections for tickets, snacks and souvenirs, audience seating, and luggage storage. On either side, spiral staircases curved up to the balcony boxes.

This was where Everly was supposed to meet up as a volunteer.

It was still forty minutes until the meetup time. The lobby was completely empty, not even the lights on, and the parts away from the windows were pitch black.

Everly and Old John looked around for a bit, found the emergency evacuation map inside the theater building, pulled out her phone and snapped a quick photo, then cut through the roped-off waiting area at the edge of the lobby, continued further in, and pushed open the doors leading to the performance hall.

Horror Movie Survival Rule #3: Always know your exits ahead of time.

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Even if it's not a horror movie, doing this in real life can't hurt.

The performance hall was brightly lit.

The theater troupe had already arrived, getting a feel for the stage and running through their marks. The lights in front of the stage were blazing, music flowing, and actors in various costumes moved back and forth, their expressions vivid, fully absorbed in rehearsal—a full-on sensory overload that was hard to tear your eyes from.

Everly and Old John plopped down in a couple of front-row seats, watching the rehearsal as they waited. Meanwhile, more volunteers drifted in, also finding spots in the hall to sit and watch the show like Everly. Among them, Everly unexpectedly ran into Misha, an old elementary school classmate.

She remembered Misha as a chubby, shy little kid. Three years later, though, she'd blossomed into a slim, pretty girl.

Every resident of Lemort Town had a special awe and affection for the four heroes who had once saved their town. Seeing Everly, Misha was visibly thrilled, immediately sidled up to ask what Everly was doing, and thanks to her people skills, quickly swapped positions with a guy in charge of maintaining order inside the auditorium, getting herself into the same floor team as Everly.

"Now we get to work together all day." Misha sat back down next to Everly, beaming.

Everly just nodded.

After hanging out by the stage for half an hour, the meeting time finally arrived. Everly said goodbye to Old John and, along with Misha and the other volunteers, went to the lobby to get instructions from Susan, the art director.

At this point, there were still 20 minutes until the theater opened, and 40 minutes until the first show began. A town this small rarely saw events like this—you could already see people lining up outside the theater gates through the closed lobby doors.

Everly and Misha, already acquainted, were posted in the northwest corner of the main lobby, standing in the aisle, one behind the other. Their job was to shut down anyone who got too loud or stood up and blocked the view. Old John had been sitting dead center in the front row, the best seat in the house, but seeing this, he moved over to sit near Everly.

They waited in the performance hall a while longer, and then a low murmur of voices came from the front entrance. Volunteers and staff guided the audience as they started filing in early.

Everly wasn't ushering, so she had nothing to do yet. She leaned on the back of Old John's seat, making small talk with her grandpa while half-heartedly watching the crowd file in. When her eyes landed on a thin figure in all black with a hood, she froze.

That familiar wave of dread and fear hit her like a flood, swallowing her whole. Her fingers dug into the chair back, and her whole body started shaking, like she'd been shoved into a frozen lake in the middle of July.

Danger! That guy was bad news—she had to get out of there!

Everly squinted at the figure, but people were blocking her view from every angle, so she couldn't get a clear look. She could only vaguely make out a backpack on their back, bulging and stuffed with something unknown.

Whatever it was, it definitely wasn't anything good... This was the downside of small-town theaters—no security checks at the entrance!

Everly strongly suspected that backpack contained some kind of lethal weapon. Forcing herself to stay calm, she leaned down and reported the situation to Old John. The two of them weighed the options between subduing the criminal on the spot and retreating first, and chose the latter.

For one, they didn't know what weapon was in the hooded figure's backpack—if it was just a bladed weapon, fine, but if it was something like acid or a bomb, charging in would be suicide. For another, the theater was packed; even now, people were still streaming in through the entrance. In that kind of environment, a sudden fight could easily trigger panic, leading to crowding and stampedes, and possibly more deaths.

So Everly pretended to need the restroom, and she and Old John left their seats one after the other, moving against the flow of people toward the small door on the west side of the performance hall. That door led to the restrooms flanking the hall, and since today was free admission, it wasn't locked.

On the way, they passed Misha. Everly raised a finger to her lips, signaling the girl to be quiet, then grabbed Misha's arm. With the cockroach disaster behind them, the townsfolk of Lemort had complete faith in the four heroes—Everly didn't need to explain anything. Misha immediately caught on, pretending she had something to share with her best friend, and followed behind Everly and Old John, leaving the bustling performance hall with them.

The audience was all crammed near the entrance waiting to get in, so the corridor on the side of the hall was empty for now. The moment they left the hall, Everly quickened her pace, nearly jogging toward the exit.

"What's going on, Everly? What happened?" Misha caught up at a run, lowering her voice to ask.

Everly glanced back at Old John behind her. He was holding up his phone, quietly calling the police—since they couldn't handle it themselves, the first thing to do was report it.

As a former police detective, Old John knew exactly how American law enforcement operated. If you didn't make it sound serious, they wouldn't take it seriously. So he led with a bombshell, telling the Mikanohara Police Department dispatcher that a dangerous individual carrying a bomb had appeared at Xincalan Theater, and they needed to send extra officers to investigate. He roughly described the person's appearance: dressed in black, wearing a hood, with a backpack on their back.

When Misha overheard Old John's words, she shuddered in fear too.

"Don't be scared, we just need to get out of here..." Everly patted the girl's shoulder reassuringly.

"Yeah." Misha nodded, staying even more alert as she followed behind Everly.

The three of them came out through the west corridor and immediately saw a huge crowd of people. The waiting lobby outside, including the stretch from the lobby to the theater's main gate, was packed with audience members here for the show.

Everly completely understood the spectacle. Mikanohara was geographically isolated, so large-scale events were rare, let alone a performance by the "Pipe Troupe," which was quite famous in Yona State. Yona State's status in the minds of Americans was similar to how Paris was regarded by the French—a byword for fashion and style. So nearly half of Mikanohara's residents had been stirred up and swarmed over to Xincalan.

The performance hall wasn't full yet. The audience was split into three lines, steadily being guided inside by volunteers and theater staff. Everly was initially considering whether to send some kind of signal for everyone to leave before these people got in, but soon, she spotted several more figures in the queue dressed in black with hoods.

Their outfits were identical to the hooded figure in the performance hall. If not for the differences in build, she'd have thought the one inside could use shadow clones.

Although her danger sense didn't trigger when she saw those people, that didn't mean they were safe. Her warning system only went off once when faced with multiple interconnected threats, so to be cautious, Everly quickly abandoned the idea of raising an alarm, and walked ahead with Misha, pushing through the crowd to clear a path for Old John behind them.

Wearing the theater staff uniform made this step go fairly smoothly.

By the time the three of them pushed through the crowd and finally reached the entrance of the performance building, standing on the steps, Everly saw that scattered across the theater's main gate, across the internal road from the performance building, were seven or eight hooded figures in black.

All of them were dressed identically, and just as Everly was considering whether to pretend she hadn't seen anything and slip out through the gate, these hooded figures, as if receiving some signal, all pulled down their hoods at once, revealing heads covered in various animal masks.

"What the—are they theater actors?" Everly heard a passerby mutter.

But of course, they weren't actors.

As the security guard looked on in shock, a black-clad figure wearing a rabbit mask strode quickly to the guard booth, pulled a silenced handgun from the small of their back, and before the guard could react, raised it and fired point-blank at his head.

"Splash." Thick, viscous blood sprayed out, staining the guard booth's window. But due to the angle, the people at the theater gate didn't notice the tragedy unfolding there.

They were too busy wondering why these hooded figures, appearing out of nowhere, were closing the theater's wrought-iron gate.

"Hey, you there—didn't they say the theater was free for a week? Why are you closing the door?" A middle-aged man who'd been shut out just as his turn came had an ugly look on his face and demanded in a gruff voice.

The masked figures said nothing. They turned their heads, exchanging glances with each other beneath their animal masks, then one with a goat mask pulled open the iron bolt, cracked the gate open a sliver, and gestured for the middle-aged man to come in.

"That's more like it—how dare you turn away an audience in broad daylight..."

The middle-aged man muttered to himself as he stepped through the iron gate. No sooner had his foot touched the ground than he heard the gate slam shut with a loud clang.

Not only did it close, but a man wearing an eagle mask pulled a lock from a pouch at his waist and snapped it shut, securing the gate.

"Hey, hey. How come he gets to go in? We want to watch the show too!" A couple who had been following the middle-aged man tried to enter with him but were roughly blocked outside, and they began pounding on the gate in frustration.

Their cries caught in their throats.

Because in the next second, the masked figures around the middle-aged man all looked down at the stout man, revealing the weapons hidden at their waists.

Axes, hammers, scythes, daggers...

Before the middle-aged man could even scream, an axe blow to the head felled him, and the others surged forward with their weapons, quickly hacking the man on the ground into a bloody pulp.

"Ahhhhhhh!"

A scream of terror came a beat too late at the theater entrance, signaling the beginning of the carnage.