Marc listened harder, fighting the urge to find a room with a window. "Think so. Just have to find the generators, add some gas."
Angela was reading movie posters, ignoring the unease of her stomach. After the morning they'd had, that was to be expected. "Okay. How about The Shadows of Fate? I loved The Chronicles of Riddick."
Marc grinned, feeling unworthy of her beauty with his long hair and unshaven face. "You just like Vin Diesel."
Angela laughed at his joking accusation, eyes admiring his sexy goatee. It added to his image of an old west gunfighter. My own John Wayne, she thought, smiling. "It was a good story."
"It was crap with a lot of eye candy."
She turned away, grinning. "Not just for the eyes."
Marc stilled suddenly, looking over the destroyed lobby and dark, shadowy hallways where he thought maybe bodies should be, but weren't. This would have made a good place to hole up, but until they'd hit it (literally) there hadn't been… "You hear that?"
She listened for a moment, hearing only the storm and things moving with the wind, then shook her head, "No. What?"
He turned, shrugging. "Sounds like someone clearing snow with a metal shovel."
The image made her frown, and she pushed at the door in her mind, as her stomach dropped. They had made over a hundred miles in the last week, and she was tired. The door hadn't opened on its own. Something was happening.
"Up, I think. We should go up," she whispered, eyes narrowing, ears open.
BOHICA, Marc thought. Bend over. Here it comes again. "But Dog and the Blaz…"
"No time."
Then they both heard it: that headache-causing sound of metal and stone meeting, but instead of a distant echo, it was loud and close. The vibrations rattled the walls and pounded through the floor under them.
"Up?"
Angela nodded, heading for the employee door to the right of the upstairs concession area. "We have to…"
The grinding noise was suddenly deafening, and Marc grabbed her arm, shoved them both into the dark stairwell as the building around them moved, knocked forward on its foundation.
A twenty foot wall of mud and debris slammed into the back of the movie theater like a bomb, blowing out walls and windows. The sound of it was like a tanker truck jackknifing, and the space immediately began filling with feet of sliding ooze. The entire back wall of the cinema crumbled under the onslaught, filling the rows of seats with thick, dark mud. The side walls held against the wall of mud, which slowed and then was finally stopped by something bigger than it was: the strip mall around the theater, which was more than a mile wide.