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PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
Tom Segura sat on a stool with Lydia, the short, curvy, brunette emcee. The two of them were having a great night, riding the wave of excitement that was their impromptu fund-raiser comedy marathon. Tom was sipping a Redbull and covertly trying to count Lydia’s tattoos every time she moved. Some of them were in really interesting places. Onstage, his friend Jeremy Essig was killing them with an on-the-spot series of jokes about a zombie reality show.
Then everything changed.
Just like that. From one side of a moment to the other.
The audience was laughing their balls off about Billy Bob and Bubba the zombies and their monster truck when suddenly a woman’s scream knocked the whole night off its wheels.
“What the hell?” cried Lydia as she launched herself from her stool. Tom was a half-second slower, and he tried to see what was going on, but there was a waitress with a tray of drinks between him and the woman who’d screamed.
“Great fucking timing,” Tom muttered as he tried to edge around to get a better look. On the stage, Jeremy looked like he was frozen into the moment, eyes and mouth wide.
The whole club went silent for a heartbeat, but as Tom stepped around the waitress to see what was up, the entire club erupted into mad panic.
Utter.
Mad.
Panic.
Suddenly everyone was screaming. Women. Men. Everyone.
On stage, Jeremy screamed, too. The part of Tom Segura’s mind that was a regular guy felt twin pangs of fear and confusion. The part of him that was a professional comic actually provided commentary.
You scream like Chloë Moretz, dude.
But then the crowd split apart as people panicked and scattered, revealing an image that Tom knew was being burned onto the front of his brain as he looked at it. A bare-chested, bloody man, viciously tearing at the skin and muscle of a woman’s throat.
Right in front of him.
This wasn’t movie special effects and it sure as shit wasn’t someone’s idea of a practical joke. What Tom was seeing fifteen feet in front of him was real. Real blood, real flesh, real madness, real pain.
And he screamed, too.
He did not remember picking anything up, and even when he threw the beer bottle he was surprised that it was his hand that winged it at the attacker’s head. Tom was not a fighter. He didn’t know many comics who were. Words had always been both his sword and shield. Sarcasm was his left hook and insight was his right cross.
He saw the bottle leave his hand, saw it close the distance in what appeared to be ultra-slow motion. Saw it strike the killer right on the temple.
As good a throw as anyone in the Major Leagues ever hurled.
Dead on. A hundred-mile-an-hour ball that burned across the plate fast enough to make a fool out of a .300 batter.
Tom expected the killer to go down.
That would have been the button on this routine. That should have been the logical end, or maybe the opening act of a new phase of his career. Tom Segura, hero comedian. The stocky kid from Cincinnati who dropped a psycho with a bottle of Coors Lite.
That was the script he was already writing in his head. That was the lead for the Breaking News.
Except …
Except that’s not how the scene played out.
The bottle hit hard, hit with real force, hit hard enough to make a clunk that Tom could hear over the woman’s gurgling screams. Then it ricocheted off of the killer and hit the woman square in the right eye.
The bottle fell to the floor.
The killer dropped the woman right on top of it.
