Dahlia was going to show them. She was going to show them all.
Tonight was the final straw. When Mom and Dad first 'suggested' she move in with her sister Ronnie to cut down on college expenses (given how much her parents were helping out with those expenses, Dahlia knew just what they really meant) Dahlia had some hope that things would go well. A little hope. A tiny bit of hope. A faint, flickering spark of hope that at the very least, they wouldn't fight the same way they did when they were teenagers stuck together in the same tiny little house.
Hope died about three hours after Dahlia finished moving her stuff into the second (smaller, but who cared?) bedroom, and the two of them settled into the living room together to watch a little TV. And Ronnie put on something called 'Grave Robbers from Outer Space'. Five minutes later, Dahlia retreated to her bedroom for the rest of the night and still slept with the lights on. The last thing she saw as she left the room was Ronnie's obnoxious little smirk of triumph, the same nasty little grin that she always had at home when she got rid of her bratty little sister. And this time, Dahlia couldn't just go tell her parents.
After a week or so, it became pretty clear that Ronnie had gotten entirely used to having her very own place after two years of college, and she had no intention of changing her habits just because Dahlia moved in. Every night, she put on some godawful ultra-gory super-violent nightmare fuel of a movie, from 'Possessor' to 'The Stench' to 'Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man' to 'Mosquito' to 'Slasher in the Rye', and every night Dahlia hid in her bedroom and blasted music through her headphones to get away from the horrifying sound of screaming. She never came out until Ronnie turned out the lights and went to bed-the thought of accidentally glimpsing some scene of eyeball-searing terror was just too much for her. And Ronnie knew it.
Being a prisoner in her own bedroom because of her inconsiderate bitch of a sister was bad enough. But tonight...Dahlia's cheeks burned at the memory. Ronnie had a few of her friends over, and Dahlia thought that maybe, just maybe she could outmaneuver her big sister this once. She pulled out her copy of 'The Avengers' and suggested they put it in...and Greg smirked at Ronnie and said, "I don't know, I was really more in the mood for something like 'Zombie Blood Nightmare'."
And Sierra said, "Oh, that one's so scary-it's my favorite, Greg!" But she was looking at Dahlia when she said it. And then she laughed, and Greg laughed, and Britney laughed, and Ronnie laughed most of all. The laughter followed Dahlia as she fled to the comfort of her bedroom, fleeing the spooky music and the sight of a decaying hand bursting up from the cemetery ground. She turned up her music, but somehow she couldn't make it loud enough to drown out the memory of that laughter.
That was six hours ago. Six hours of sulking and fuming and feeling trapped in her own room and trying very hard to ignore the wailing and screaming that her earbuds couldn't entirely shut out. Six hours of thinking about the intolerable situation her life had become, and six hours of wondering how she could possibly handle another two years of this. Now the lights in the living room were all out, the fun was apparently all over for the night...and Dahlia had made up her mind. She was going to show them. She was going to show them all.
Probably.
Dahlia slipped on a pair of pajamas and crept out of the bedroom, moving stealthily enough to at least possess plausible deniability in the event that Ronnie came out and asked what she was doing up at 1 AM on a Friday night. She turned on the living room light, half-worried that she was going to find Sierra or Britney or Greg sleeping on the couch, but it looked like everyone had gone home. She had the living room to herself. Dahlia looked over at the great big DVD cabinet on the wall, each shelf stacked full of all the movies that gave Dahlia nightmares when she was a kid. Ronnie's collection, her pride and joy. It had taken her years to put it together. This was honestly the first time Dahlia had even considered the thought that it wasn't done solely out of spite.
She grabbed 'Zombie Blood Nightmare' off the shelf and put it in. Before she could stop herself, Dahlia pressed 'Play'.
She turned the volume down a few notches-if Ronnie came in and asked, "What are you doing?", Dahlia at least wanted to be able to pretend that she had just gotten up for a little late-night viewing and that it was a total accident that she'd disturbed her big sister. Not that she was secretly hoping Ronnie would find her in here, conquering her fears with the movie that all her sister's asshole friends had chased her away with or anything. Nope. Just her, enjoying a few harmless scares in the middle of the night.
The titles came up, and Dahlia bit her lip until it went white.
But she didn't turn it off. She couldn't. She had to get over her aversion to horror movies, or Ronnie would just keep holding it over her head. Dahlia was determined to sit here, to watch every second of 'Zombie Blood Nightmare', and to keep glutting herself on terror until it didn't affect her anymore. She would beat Ronnie at her own game, become a scary movie aficionado, and the next time her sister put in 'Flesh Devourers' or 'Stab Queens of Dorm Thirteen', she'd just sit there and nonchalantly-
A zombie's hand burst up from the ground onscreen, clutching wildly around as if it knew living flesh was nearby. Dahlia grabbed a pillow to stifle her screams.
Within moments, the solitary zombie had become a horde. They stumbled their way through the graveyard, finding a funeral in progress and swarming onto the mourners. Dahlia watched in stark terror as the men and women in mourner's black panicked and scattered, desperately fleeing the walking dead, but the zombies dragged them all down. Dahlia bit her knuckle, trying not to feel nauseous at the gory special effects of tearing and rending and eating...
Without warning, the scene shifted to another group of people, this time in a hospital. The recently deceased sprang back up off of the operating table, overwhelming doctors and nurses who had nothing more than scalpels to defend themselves with. The newly-made zombies tore into their victims, who rose as zombies themselves and burst out of the operating rooms to assault the sick and the weak, few of whom could even rise to run when the undead descended on them. There were more scenes of ripping flesh, blood everywhere and bodies shredded apart...
And then the film jumped again, this time to a boarded-up house and a mob of zombies breaking their way into it to murder their inhabitants. Dahlia stared at the film with almost as much confusion as horror; the scenes didn't even look like they were shot using the same camera, let alone from the same script. This was the longest she'd ever made herself sit through one of these movies, so she didn't have a whole lot to go by, but...was this all there really was to a horror movie? Just a bunch of random clips of people getting killed in disgusting ways? She'd been watching for almost ten minutes now, and she hadn't even seen a whiff of a plot. Just gory stuff.
And then the scene shifted again, and Dahlia got really confused.
This time, there weren't even any people on the screen. No zombies, either. Not even an establishing shot. It was just a mass of swirling colors, rippling slowly along from left to right as they shifted slowly from red to purple. The spooky organ music vanished too, replaced by a droning, ambient throb that sounded like the love child of New Age and techno. It was almost soothing after all the creepiness Dahlia had just witnessed.
She stared intensely at the screen, trying to figure out how any of this fit in with the horror movie she was gritting her way through just a few moments ago. Any second, she expected the mellow and meditative images to cut back to unspeakable body horror, but the colors kept up their lazy dance across her eyes as Dahlia kept watching. The purple gave way to a gentle, navy blue, which gradually rippled into a soothing forest green. Dahlia very cautiously relaxed, still half-believing that this was some sort of trick to get her guard down for the next jump scare.
But it didn't happen. The music just kept softly cooing in her ears, the electronic instruments taking on a strangely human quality in the way that they soothed Dahlia into peaceful relaxation. It sounded sort of like a lullaby, the kind you sang when you didn't know any actual lullabies but you wanted to put someone to sleep. She couldn't make out any words or anything, but it sounded calming nonetheless. Dahlia leaned back in her seat, the adrenaline of terror giving way to quiet relief.
