Lexi stumbled into the living room with her dirty blonde hair looking like the 'before' part of an ad for styling mousse, dressed in a pair of pink-and-white striped pajamas that she'd only intended to put on but had wound up using. Her hazel eyes drooped about a quarter of the way shut, and it was tempting to just turn right around, flop back into her bed, and let them close the rest of the way so that she could get a decent night's sleep.
But she had promised Madison. And not just out of obligation, either--somehow Madison always had a nose for exactly the kind of crazy shit that appealed to Lexi's fucked up sense of humor. She was always the one who found the really messed up YouTube videos of 'man in the street' interviews on local news shows that went hilariously wrong, or movies that were made with a camcorder and featured bizarre performances and godawful special effects and deranged scripts, or mp3s of songs that were so terrible they made Coke squirt out of Lexi's nose. If she said it was worth getting up at 3 AM to watch the public access channel, Lexi actually kind of believed her.
And she knew that she wouldn't get any peace until she did. She flopped onto the couch, fighting the temptation to lie down, and turned on the television.
There wasn't much on. The TV listings at 3 AM on a Sunday morning looked like they catered exclusively to an audience of gullible insomniacs; Lexi scrolled through programs with titles like 'Firmer Breasts Now!' and 'Never Cook Too Much Again!' for what seemed like ages before she finally found something just labeled 'Local Public Access Television 1' for a twenty-four hour block. (Which of course meant she couldn't just DVR the damned thing and watch it later. How did Madison even find this thing, anyway?) She hit enter, and the screen flipped over to a static image of a slogan that looked like it had been dashed off in five minutes in Microsoft Paint. 'Local Access--Television 4U, ByU!'
Lexi had just gotten to the point where she had convinced herself that she was 'resting her eyes' waiting for the show to start when the sound of blaring organ music startled her into wakefulness. She blinked rapidly to refocus her gaze on the television, and saw a logo of stark white letters on a background that was a swirling spiral of dark gray on darker gray. 'THE KIDNAP SHOW', it read. The organ music ratcheted up in its intensity until Lexi half-expected the logo to cut away to an undead Vincent Price frantically hammering away at the keyboard.
Instead, it cut away (well, almost cut away--hilariously, the logo didn't quite fade out properly, instead faintly showing like a watermark on the screen) to a young man in his mid-twenties, wearing a white shirt with ruffled sleeves that hadn't been popular since Beau Brummel and dark pants. He was glaring at the camera with what was presumably supposed to be smoldering intensity, but a couple of things kept him from pulling it off. First, he had a skinny neck with a prominent adam's apple, a nose that could charitably be called Roman but which would more accurately be termed as parrot-like, ears that stuck out almost ninety degrees from his head, and a frizzy mop of hair, all of which distracted from his eyes pretty thoroughly.
Secondly, the camera clearly wasn't where he thought it was, so his smoldering gaze was directed just a little bit to the left and it made him look more like he was really really irritated with his floor manager for not getting the spiral to go away like it was supposed to. Lexi was already choking down great snorts of laughter.
"Welcome," he said, straining for a lower register than his voice was naturally able to reach and sounding as a result like he was perpetually gasping for breath. "To the Kidnap Show. Tonight, we have two new victims for you. Beautiful, sensual, young women who will fall into our clutches, live, on the air. They will try to resist--of course they'll try. But you who watch...the Kidnap Show...know that there is no escaping the power of sexual slavery." He turned, exposing his profile for a few seconds before they cut to Camera Two. "Let's watch!"
The screen cut away to a view of an anonymous-looking staircase, with three men wearing dark clothes and ski masks. They looked like they were trying to be intimidating, but they looked sweaty and uncomfortable in the July heat. The camera zoomed past them to show a nondescript wooden door. (Still overlaid by the show's logo, of course. There was nothing quite so funny as people desperately failing to be taken seriously.)
"We're now ready to pick up our first victim," the host said in voiceover. "She called us last week, deep in the influence of our hypnotic spell, and told us that she would be a perfect candidate for the Kidnap Show. She has no close family, and only a few friends who would notice her disappearance. We commanded her to take a week's vacation, and to make sure to watch the show tonight at the appointed time. Now that she's been primed for obedience, it's time to pick her up and bring her back to the studio. Let's see if she managed to resist, shall we?"
As if the words were a signal, the men lumbered into action. They opened the door and trotted down a bland off-white hallway, followed by the cameraman...who alternated between falling so far behind he lost them around corners and racing to catch up until he almost bumped into their backs. All four of them, including the cameraman, were huffing with exhaustion by the time they got down to one door in particular. They stopped, nodded to each other, and went inside.
At first, it was impossible to really see anything--the cameraman was following three sizable guys into a small room, so the camera just showed silly spiral overlaid on black T-shirt for a moment. But when they moved out into the wider area, Lexi's jaw dropped. She recognized that room. She recognized that apartment. In retrospect, she even recognized the bland hallway that looked like every other bland hallway in every other apartment complex. She was looking at Madison's place.
And sure enough, there was Madison, sitting on her ratty old couch that she'd found sitting next to the dumpster in her parking garage, staring at the television with rapt attention. She had her blue-and-black striped pajamas pulled down to her knees, and this was not actually the way that Lexi expected to find out she wasn't a natural redhead. "It appears she didn't," the host said. He sounded impossibly smug, like it was his doing that they caught Madison masturbating in the middle of the night.
The camera swung around, taking in the room, and Lexi caught a glimpse of the television. It was tuned to the Kidnap Show, the screen within the screen warping with distortion as the camera caught an image of itself. Lexi suddenly realized why Madison had been so insistent that she watch tonight. She was actually going to punk the actors playing the kidnappers and pretend to be their mindless victim of the week. They probably normally hired actresses to play their would-be wanna-be sex slaves, but Lexi knew first-hand that Madison was pretty relentless when it came to talking someone into doing what she wanted.
