Video Night

by Adam Cesare

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

Grab your samurai swords and the remote control: it’s going to be a long night.

It's 1988 and two best friends—one departing for college, one destined for bad boy townie life—decide to have a final video night before their friendship changes forever. Billy and Tom’s plan is perfect. They've got pizza and beer, and Tom even managed to convince his girlfriend, Darcy, to bring a friend, Billy's neighbor and crush, Rachel. But what they don't know is that there's an invasion underway.

Across the street, Rachel's sister, Rhonda, was one of the first to turn. A slithering, chitinous evil has overtaken her body and mind, and she'll do anything to spread the alien infection. Blood, sex, rock and roll, invaders from outer space, and tender perspectives on teen male friendship: Video Night is one cult classic that has it all!
 
“The writing moves like a greased torpedo, compulsively readable as it rockets through your brain.” —Fangoria
 
“Hit that first chapter. It’ll hook you, and the next time you look up, you’ll have swallowed the book. It’ll be nesting inside you like a seed, like an egg, like an invasion.” —Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
 

Release date: September 29, 2026

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 304

Sample

LONG ISLAND, NY, 1988

TUESDAY

THE NIGHT WAS COOL AND CLEAR: the perfect night for being young, drunk, and unemployed.

Jake liked to get high while they did it. Rhonda didn’t, but she had no complaints. Jake was a big, tall, sandy-haired Irish beach bum who probably took in more sun than was healthy. Rhonda just wanted to do it, period.

The night had been a serviceable, if unspectacular, date. First they stopped at one of the last drive-ins left on Long Island. The movie was A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. It had already been out for weeks, but the drive-in ran its movies until the film dissolved, and would probably still be playing it through the end of the season. Jake was upset that Freddy didn’t take as much time killing as he did joking around, but Rhonda enjoyed it. After that they parked in the woods and had a few beers. Jake ate something out of a plastic baggie (mushrooms, she assumed) and then turned on the stereo for a little late-night hanky-panky in his van. The park after closing was a favorite place for the couple to end a night. After the sex they would usually turn the music down and listen to the crickets and look for falling stars through the sunroof.

“Little Dolls” boomed on the cassette player, rattling the windows and sending pleasant vibrations up her buttocks and lower back. Jake had his drugs and Rhonda had her Ozzy. Different strokes for different folks, she thought, as long as they were both getting hot.

For a few minutes it was great. Heavy metal, sweet sweat, and warm hands mingled with Jake’s rough-but-sincere gyrations. Rhonda smiled and let loose a tiny moan.

It started to get weird when Jake’s beads of sweat became less morning dew, more rushing river.

The night was chilly. Fall was already here and the heat in the van hadn’t worked since they had started dating, years ago now. Jake shouldn’t have been sweating so much, even in the throes of passion.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He just grunted and kept pumping, a soft wheeze in his breath. Must be the drugs, she thought. It was getting so good now that she didn’t care.

His nails dug into her back. “Not yet,” she moaned. He didn’t. The song was now Alice Cooper’s “Freedom.” Not as good as Alice’s earlier stuff, but Jake was cute for putting together a mixtape for her.

They kept at it, but something was wrong. Jake was unusually quiet. He was not muttering his usual foulmouthed compliments, the kind he picked up from dirty movies. Instead of telling her how “hot” she was, he remained silent, his stomach audibly grumbling.

The gurgles were distracting. What they were doing stopped feeling good and began to feel gross.

“Let’s slow down, honey.”

Jake just shook his head. She could see even in what little light there was that he had gone pale. Jake kept his mouth shut, his lower lip trembling like a nauseated person trying to stay with it. He began thrusting harder, and things went from uncomfortable to painful.

“Stop!” She pushed his hips away just as he opened his mouth to vomit. Liquid sprinkled her naked belly as she tried to crawl away from him. He was sick all over the carpet. Rhonda despaired for a moment over how difficult the van was going to be to clean, then snapped back to reality.

“Hold on, baby.” She threw a blanket over his shivering body and placed the back of her hand against his forehead. He was burning up, but that wasn’t the most alarming part. There were dark swirls of blood in his puke and a bulge forming in his neck.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said and wrapped her arms around him from behind. Whatever was stuck in there, she had to clear it from his airway. She had her CPR certification and had spent summers as a lifeguard at Jones Beach. Even though she’d spent most of her time at work sipping vodka cranberries and chewing spearmint gum to hide the scent from her boss, she still knew the Heimlich.

She put her hands at the proper position and pulled up and in with a quick jerk. Jake groaned but the bulge didn’t move. Blood dribbled down his chin.

Rhonda put one blood-streaked hand to her mouth. Tears stung her eyes and she tried to wipe them away. You have to keep the patient calm.

The bubble in Jake’s neck got bigger, looking like an enlarged Adam’s apple, slowly shifting higher and higher. Blood started running from his nose and eyes.

He needs a hospital. She began searching through his balled-up clothes for the keys to the van.

Jake made a sound like he was trying to clear phlegm; she stopped and stared at him. The bulge looked like it had almost passed now. She figured the hospital would be too far away if he was choking to death. Wrapping her arms around him again, she gave another tug. Tearing at his ribs with all her might, she finally elicited a sound like uncorking a bottle. He made one last wheeze and collapsed face down, his head bouncing off the floor of the van.

When she turned him over, she got her first look at the obstruction. Between his half-parted lips she could see it moving inside his mouth. Tiny wet tendrils cautiously licked out at the corners of his lips. The appendages felt the air outside and then darted back in, as if it were some kind of hermit crab with Jake’s head as a shell.

Rhonda screamed. Jake lay still. She checked his pulse: nothing. She was momentarily relieved when his mouth started to move, but then came the realization that it wasn’t Jake moving. The thing in his mouth was moving him.

One spiny leg and then another jutted out from Jake’s mouth. They worked their way to his cheeks, where they slipped and left streaks of slime before finding purchase. Small pearls of blood appeared beneath the legs’ sharp points as they pierced his skin.

Rhonda pressed herself against the door of the van, staring aghast. She choked back tears and tried to remain quiet as she fumbled for the door handle.

The creature began to push against the corners of Jake’s mouth, its legs forming a grotesque, impossibly wide smile on her boyfriend’s face as it pushed itself free. Rhonda heard a crack and winced as she thought of Jake’s crushed jaw and destroyed teeth.

It was a form impossible to fathom. A giant cockroach blended with a squid and a porcupine writhed and shook its way free from Jake’s mouth. It was about the size of a loaf of bread and was something no biology class could have prepared her for. Smooth and slimy on its belly, yet jagged and angular along its back: at once insect and reptilian. Even in all of her little sister’s Zoobooks, the ones they had been so fond of growing up, there was nothing like the thing in the van.

Rhonda let out a surprised, pained scream as she opened the door and tumbled to the ground outside. Dead leaves broke her fall when she landed with a puff of dust and dirt. She rose to her feet, keeping her eyes on the creature. It was standing on Jake’s chest and shaking off its myriad spines like a wet dog. Blood and meat sprayed the van’s carpeting and splotched against the nearest wall.

She slammed the door shut and peered into one of the van’s windows. The creature appeared disinterested in Rhonda. It wandered around Jake’s body, occasionally making a loud clicking noise that she could hear even from outside of the van.

Something in the back of her mind screamed, Run. But she stayed and watched as the bug, or whatever it was, clumsily tiptoed around Jake’s body. When it had made several rounds, it stopped and produced a long, spiked tentacle from under its mouth. A nightmare of a hypodermic needle, sharp on the edge, attached to what looked like an umbilical cord. She screamed for a second time as the tentacle dug into Jake’s chest with a squirt of blood.

Retracting the blade, the creature turned to sense where the sound had come from. Two flaps on either side of its body rose up, like ears or satellite dishes. It then tossed itself at the van’s window with suicidal abandon, thudding against the glass and leaving a splotch of mucus and blood behind. That was all the incentive Rhonda needed to start running.

She was only a few feet away when she heard a second thud and the crack of glass. She did not turn around. Run and don’t look back.

In junior high she had been on the varsity track team. Once she got to high school and began dating Jake Connolly, her afternoon run had been replaced by a steady diet of heavy metal radio and cigarettes. Now that she had been out of school for a year and was no longer required to take basic phys ed, she became winded just walking down the block.

Suppressing a cough, she heard glass shatter in the distance. A few more long strides away, she turned and instantly regretted it. On the ground outside the van, the creature used its barbed tentacle to dig into the metal door and catapult itself after her. It sailed ten or so feet and hit the ground running. All six legs galloped in perfect formation, no four touching the ground at the same time.

She whipped her head forward and commanded herself to focus on getting away. Her bare feet pounded the grass and dirt. Twigs and leaves snapped as she prayed she would not stomp down onto anything sharp in the darkness. She remembered the movie from earlier that night, how those types of movies always had a scene just like this. That girl in the movies was always scantily clad. She always fell when chased. Rhonda Krieger would not fall.

The sounds of the creature’s pursuit were gaining too fast. She turned again, just in time to watch as it crouched low to the ground and hefted its body with unbelievable speed and grace. It passed a low-hanging branch and shot out its prehensile feeler, wrapped it around the limb, and swung for a few feet.

Too fast was the last thought she could muster before it was upon her, hitting her with the same force it must have used to break the window. Its quilled body and scrambling legs scraped her abdomen as it knocked her over. The ground kicked the wind out of her as she landed on her back.

By the time she caught her breath, the thing was up on its spindly legs, climbing up her stomach. It clicked its small jaws together inches from her face. She tried using her fists to knock it off her chest, flailing against it with all the strength she could muster, but her attempt at self-defense resulted in nothing but pain. She put her hands in front of her eyes to protect her face from the creature’s small, foul-smelling mouth. As she raised her fists, she could see that she had broken off several of the animal’s sharp quills. The spines stuck through the flesh in her hands, sending waves of pain up her arms.

She saw all of this by the lights of the distant parking lot. The fluorescence of the bulbs filtered through the trees of the park and illuminated the thing’s oozing body. It was a grotesque, pointed, clattering mess. The needle-tipped appendage glinted as it hovered above her for a moment. The creature’s clicks and screams accelerated, reaching a crescendo as it shot the stinger down into Rhonda’s chest.

Pain. There was pain between her breasts. The creature’s clicks subsided, and she could hear the beast suckle at her insides. Before the pain stopped completely, she felt a rush of cold… as if the creature were leaving something dark inside her body.

WEDNESDAY

BEING FIFTEEN HAD BEEN DIFFICULT, Billy Rile remembered, but being seventeen was a hell of a lot worse. Billy often thought about things of this nature while playing video games, his head filled with deep, existential musings during his extended sessions on Nintendo. Meditations on how tough things were now, punctuated by the fear of how much tougher they could get once he left for college. It wasn’t self-pity. He was simply being a realist.

Billy’s fingers fit naturally on the blocky controller in his hand. He was barely paying attention to the television, yet he was still able to make Mario run, jump, and eat mushrooms with the physical acumen of a short Italian plumber half his age. The game and cartridge were two years old. Its levels were so familiar that Billy could play through them by muscle memory. The ease of the game afforded him time for abstract thought.

Thoughts about how he knew his mother and father were going to be able to help him financially. Thoughts of how he would balance a job to help them pay for a car and college. Thoughts of supple and full breasts. He wondered if he would ever get to cup and nuzzle real ones before he died.

These were the big questions in a teenage geek’s life.

Mostly, though, he thought about his friend Tom Mathers and what the hell they were going to do without each other.

Tom was not going to college, nor did he want to. Tom would be lucky to be attending their high school graduation at the end of the school year. Billy felt a mix of concern and anger toward his lifelong friend. He knew that articulating such concern would land him a punch in the arm and leave him labeled a “homo” by Tom, but he worried for his friend’s future all the same. Billy wasn’t entirely goal-oriented, but he knew that a person should have higher aspirations than working in his uncle’s liquor store for the majority of his life until he saved up enough to buy a secondhand muscle car. That—best-case scenario—was exactly the path that Tom was on.

He also felt anger over the fact that Tom’s crappy academic performance, on the few days that he did attend school, might soon drive the boys apart. Billy went down the list of reasons he hated this: Tom would no longer be there to sit with him at lunch, play video games, steal dirty magazines at the 7-Eleven, or be there to make sure that he only got mildly bullied. But aside from all that, it was the least outwardly significant thing that was most important to Billy. There will be no more video night, he thought, letting Mario fall to his death in a pit of lava.

He was on the second to last castle in the game, but the loss of a life did not faze him; he was too troubled. Every Friday, Tom would willingly forgo whatever party he had been invited to that night and watch a movie at Billy’s house instead. It was tradition, and traditions weren’t supposed to end.

Way back in his elementary school days, Billy’s family had been one of the first in town to get a VHS player, making 1982 the height of Billy Rile’s popularity. His dad had even converted the basement into a well-lit carpeted family room with a nice TV set and ample comfy seating arrangements. In the years since that top-loading home entertainment monstrosity (and Billy’s glory days), the Rile family had upgraded to a hi-fi player, but the monster movies at Billy’s house had long ago lost their appeal with his classmates. All except Tom, of course. For the past few years, video night had consisted of just the two of them, and more recently Darcy Roberts, whom Tom had started fooling around with during the summer before their senior year.

There was a single knock followed by the front door opening downstairs. Billy paused his game. He heard muffled voices as Tom exchanged his usual brief pleasantries with Billy’s mother and then ran up the carpeted stairs, his boots thudding as he took them two at a time.

“Hey, dickwad,” Tom said as he opened Billy’s bedroom door without knocking. The taller boy slung his leather jacket over his shoulder, as he always did upon entering a room, even if he did not intend to stay. It was an old black leather motorcycle jacket, the kind that the punk kids at school would have loved to tear up, sew patches on, and poke metal studs into. Tom’s was in its original condition, though, with enough wear to show that it had seen some action. Tom glanced at the small television and pointed. “What castle is this?”

“Second to last,” Billy said. Tom could not tell which level it was, not because he never played Super Mario Bros. (he played at Billy’s house quite frequently), but because he lacked the skills necessary to be familiar with such an advanced level of the game. Tom might have the lady skills, but Billy had the Nintendo skills. This was more depressing to Billy than it was a point of pride.

“Wow, good job, nerd. Finish up; we gotta go. I got shit to do today.” Tom talked like this all the time, but the use of nerd was meant to be a term of endearment despite being glaringly, painfully true. Billy’s bedroom teemed with proof that he was indeed a nerd. Even his coolest personal possession was still slightly nerdy: an authentic samurai sword that he’d received as a gift from the World Showcase gift shop when his parents had taken him to Epcot Center a few years earlier. The tempered steel was for display only, but that didn’t stop Tom from occasionally whirling it around. It was way sharper than a display item had any right to be. These impromptu samurai training sessions made Billy anxious, but they did make Tom look cool.

Sword excepted, everything else in Billy’s room screamed spoiled geek: his Empire Strikes Back bedsheets, piles of Starlog and Fangoria magazines, the collection of GoBots and Transformers on his dresser (he prayed that Tom didn’t know he still occasionally played with them), and a bookshelf that sported a mix of Stephen King and some Doc Savage paperbacks that had been hand-me-downs from his father. Add to that his string-bean arms, perpetually damp hair, and profuse sweating habits, and it didn’t take Crockett and Tubbs to deduce the state of Billy’s virginity.

It was nothing like Tom’s room. If Billy’s was the room of a boy, Tom’s was that of a man. A square-jawed, stubble-faced, tousle-haired man, complete with badass leather jacket. Tom’s room was much smaller, and the wallpaper was ripped and faded, but instead of toys and kids’ stuff, Tom had the accoutrements of an adult—or at the very least a late adolescent. On his walls Tom had Hustler centerfolds and posters for bands like Dio and W.A.S.P., and atop his dresser he kept cassette tapes and drug paraphernalia.

“What do you have to do today?” Billy asked and pressed the power button on the Nintendo. He was no longer concerned with finishing his game. He had rescued the princess before, and it was never that exciting.

“Darcy’s coming over later, so she’s what I’m doing.” Tom stuck out his tongue and wiggled it, putting his hand up for a high five. Billy gave it to him with little enthusiasm. It wasn’t just talk. Billy knew that Darcy Roberts was putting out regularly for Tom. Billy was jealous, of course, and it made his friend even more of a hero to him, but he was also mystified as to why Darcy would. Tom treated her well, but a girl of Darcy’s standing should have been dating football players, not mildly drug-dependent teens who rarely attended school.

“Oh, speaking of Darcy, I almost forgot to tell you that she’s going to come Friday to, you know, video night.” Tom said the words hurriedly and nonchalantly, trying to defuse the effect he knew it would have on Billy. Billy winced. It was understood between the two friends that Billy and Darcy didn’t get along, especially when it came to video night. Darcy would come over and be on her best behavior for about ten minutes. After that she was either forcefully making out with Tom, or she would ask to use the phone and then talk for hours to her friends. The kissing was nowhere near as bad as the talking.

As part of the plush conversion of the basement, Billy’s parents had installed an extra phone line. It was a line that Darcy used liberally and without fear of pissing off Billy’s folks. Her loud Long Island accent and heinously annoying laugh would drown out all the dialogue, robbing the film of suspense and making the gory parts far less enjoyable.

Billy forced his face to look as dejected as possible and pursed his lips to speak. Tom cut him off before he could get a single word out.

“But—but it won’t be so bad because I’m going to get her to bring a friend,” Tom said, smiling widely and putting a hand on Billy’s shoulder.

“Oh, no, you don’t have to do that. It’s fine, really. Darcy can come alone. No problem.” Billy wanted to stop this guest list from ballooning any further. He didn’t need Darcy’s voice in stereo. He got chills thinking about the way she pronounced coffee. Caw-fee. It was a stone-cold fact that the more annoying people were, the more conspicuous their Long Island accent.

“Don’t be a jerk. Darcy has lots of hot friends. I’ll make sure she brings one of them. Not a cow.” Tom held up his hand as if he were in court swearing on a Bible—as he had done on numerous occasions. “I promise.”

Billy rolled his eyes. Tom never seemed to realize what an asshole he could be. Tom continued, “Maybe even someone special.” He crossed Billy’s room and stopped at the window, parting the blinds with two fingers. “Has she been dancing around in her room naked lately?”

“No, you goddamn pervert.”

“You say that with such certainty. You’ve been watching closely to make sure she doesn’t, eh?” Tom gave him a quick slap on the stomach with his knuckles. Billy prepared himself too late and the blow really hurt, but he tried not to let it show. “Oh, don’t put on that face. I’ll try my best to get the girl here, okay?”

The possibility, however distant, of rubbing up against something warm and female, especially if that something were Rachel Krieger, was so compelling that Billy surrendered without another word of protest.

“Now let’s get this show on the road,” Tom said and put his jacket back on with the same flourish and style with which he had taken it off mere moments ago.

Billy couldn’t stop himself from thinking about how he wanted to be as rude, as unstable, as cool as Tom, even if it was only for a day. Then he followed his friend out the bedroom door.

Rhonda Krieger awoke to the warmth of the sun rising high above the Heckscher State Park trees. She was naked, hurt all over, and didn’t feel like herself. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Leaves and grass tickled her back and caught between her ass cheeks as she lifted herself up. She looked down at her body, more intrigued by her own nudity than she was with the quarter-sized hole that had been drilled into her chest.

After she carefully plucked the spikes from the oozing wounds in her hands, she cupped her breasts. She pressed them together, then traced a manicured fingernail around her prominent tan lines and down to the wound between them. A small discharge of green . . .