A glitter-soaked nightmare from the fever dream of 1979.
Randy “Razor” Romano slammed back a warm bottle of cherry-flavored wine cooler, cranked the wheel with one hand, and flipped his rearview mirror to avoid the shame. Somewhere behind him was Los Angeles. Far behind him, in fact, judging by the endless tunnel of pines, fog, and pitch-black nothingness swallowing the road ahead. But the guilt clung tighter than his shirt collar.
He hit play on the 8-track. Stayin’ Alive warbled through the speakers, tinny and distorted. Appropriate. He was neither staying nor alive, not in the ways that counted.
Just twelve hours ago, Randy had been kicked out of VelvetTone Studios with a bloody nose and an unpaid bar tab. “You’re not the Razor anymore,” his ex-manager had sneered. “You’re a butter knife with a drug habit.”
And maybe that was true. His Cadillac smelled like stale cologne and fried chicken. The passenger seat was littered with cassettes and rejection letters from radio stations that used to beg for his mixes.
He lit a cigarette. It flared, drawing his eye, and that’s when he saw it just beyond, something massive and shadowed crossing the road. He jerked the wheel.
The Caddy screamed as it slid sideways, fishtailed on damp pine needles, and barreled straight into a tree with a sound like the crash of a glittering chandelier with robot bones.
When Randy came to, the windshield was spiderwebbed, his nose was broken again, and “Boogie Wonderland” was stuck in an eternal loop. The headlights barely reached beyond the twisted fender. Smoke rose in lazy spirals from the hood.
“Perfect,” he croaked, patting his silk shirt as if looking for a hidden bottle of something. No dice.
The woods were whispering. Not in the creepy, haunted way, but more like… music. Somewhere out there in the dark, there was a beat. A funky beat.
He stumbled out of the car, Italian leather shoes crunching on pinecones and broken dreams. The air was thick with fog and something else, sweet, almost like burnt hairspray and synthetic vanilla. He followed it, drawn forward by that pulsing sound.
It started as flickers of light through the trees. Red. Green. Blue. A strobe. Then came the outline of a building where no building should be. Large. Rectangular. Neon letters, flickering and faded, spelled out: THE FEVER.
A roller rink. Out here?
The parking lot was empty. Not a single car. Yet the place was clearly active, lights swirling inside, music pumping. The rink’s windows were fogged over, but inside, silhouettes danced to a song that hadn’t been popular since polyester was a lifestyle.
He stood frozen, one hand on the door handle. Something deep in his lizard brain screamed at him to run, to walk back to the road, to take his chances with the night and the cold. But then the sound of female laughter from inside, rich, throaty, inviting, and a scent drifting from the vents that was both sweet and musky, like perfume mixed with… wet fur?
The choice seemed simple, step inside to a world he understood, music, lights, women, or face the wilderness alone with a broken nose and a broken career.
He pushed the door open, and the beat swallowed him whole.
Inside the music throbbed louder. Le Freak by Chic.
He stood on the threshold. Fog swirled behind him. The scent of Aqua Net drifted from within like a siren’s perfume.
Randy “Razor” Romano had never walked away from a party. Especially not one that smelled like 1979 and danced like a promise.
He adjusted his gold chains, popped his collar, and inhaled deeper. The scent hit him, sweet, humid, and chemical, like a strawberry milkshake had been left in a tanning bed. Then came the warmth, sticky and unnatural, like stepping into a sauna run by Studio 54.
Inside, the THE FEVER was alive.
A DJ booth stood like a pulpit above the rink, manned by a silhouette in a glittering jumpsuit. Lava lamps pulsed behind him. Beneath, the rink swirled with bodies, dancing, skating, grinding in slow loops to a hypnotic beat.
But they weren’t people.
Randy’s eyes adjusted. The dancers were huge. Hairy. Covered in fur. Not costumes, real, matted fur that shimmered under disco lights. Their roller skates groaned beneath the weight. Thick, glistening muscles flexed under glittered hot pants and rhinestone-studded bras. One of them winked at him while performing a flawless reverse moonwalk.
He took a step back. The door was gone.
Where the hell was the door?
“Yo. You look like you just saw a sasquatch in a halter top.”
Randy turned, startled. A small, wiry man stood beside a defunct claw machine. He wore fingerless gloves and a neon headband, and had the energy of someone who hadn’t slept since the Reagan administration.
“Name’s Jimmy Fizz,” the man said, offering a hand sticky with cotton candy. “You must be new.”
Randy stared. “Are those… bigfoot?”
“Sasquatch,” Jimmy said. “Lady Sasquatch. You don’t wanna say the wrong thing around them. They’ve got sensitive vibes.”
“They’re real?” Randy blinked as one of them drop-split on the rink and let out a feral scream that somehow stayed on beat.
Jimmy nodded solemnly. “They’re real, and they’re in heat. Permanent heat. Ever since the Mirrorball Event of ’79.”
Randy opened his mouth to respond, but the lights suddenly cut.
A silence dropped like an axe.
Then, from the center of the rink, a figure emerged. Taller than the rest. Wearing a gold lamé cape and platform boots the size of coffins.
Her afro defied physics.
Her name, Jimmy whispered like a curse, was Velvet Talon.
The music shifted, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” pulsed through the rink with a throbbing, electronic pulse. The creatures responded, their movements becoming more fluid, more sensual.
Velvet Talon, auburn-furred and statuesque, broke away from the group and skated toward the edge of the rink. Up close, she was even more terrifying in her unnatural allure. Her amber eyes glowed faintly under the lights, pupils narrow and vertical like a cat’s.
“Dance?” she asked, her voice a purr that vibrated in Randy’s chest.
Randy tensed. “No thanks,” he replied, aiming for casual, though his heart slammed against his ribs like it was trying to break out.
She pouted, lips thick and gleaming with something that shimmered unnaturally. “You look like dancer. Good hips.” Her gaze lowered. “Good everything.”
Randy had worked with enough frontmen, enough desperate stars and chemically-enhanced sex symbols to recognize predatory desire when he saw it. But this wasn’t just hunger, it was wrong. Like watching a house cat’s flirtations through the eyes of a tiger.
“Sorry, sweetheart. I’ve got two left feet.”
She laughed, a sound like bells wrapped in silk. “You come dance later. I save special move for you.”
She skated back into the fog with the others, but not before casting one last glance over her shoulder. On a human woman, it might have been seductive. On her, it was a warning dressed up like a promise.
Jimmy leaned in, eyes wide. “She likes you,” he muttered. “That’s very, very bad.”
“I gotta get out of here,” Randy said, noticing a group of ragged hikers hiding in the shadows, mud-slicked and wide-eyed. One of them was bleeding from the shoulder. Another held a broken hiking pole like a sword.
One screamed, “They’re coming!”
Then came the howls. The beat surged. Green lights pulsed from the disco ball, casting shadows like claws. Sasquatch hookers poured out of the locker rooms and concession stands, skating low and fast, arms outstretched, teeth bared and glistening.
Jimmy grabbed Randy. “Follow me if you want to not die.”
They fled through the snack bar and into the manager’s office, slamming the door behind them. Outside, the sounds of horror and Donna Summer bled together.
Randy panted, heart hammering like a drum machine on coke. “What the hell is this place?”
“It’s a trap,” said one of the hikers, a woman with a bleeding arm and a hoodie that said “I Hike For Snacks.” “We found it by accident. That was four days ago. I think time is weird here. Like, looped.”
Randy looked around the tiny office. Dust-covered filing cabinets. A framed picture of the grand opening in ’78. His own teenage face in the background, grinning like an idiot.
“I helped open this place,” he whispered.
Jimmy nodded. “You’re part of the rhythm, man. You’re in the groove. That’s why they want you.”
A sudden crash. The door shook. Fingers, long, fur-covered, with acrylic nails, poked through the cracks.
“They’re coming through the walls,” the hiker moaned.
Velvet Talon’s voice echoed through the rink, “You brought the beat, Razor… Now dance with us.”
The pounding bass slowed, warping into a molasses-thick throb that pulsed through the walls, the floor, Randy’s skull. His heartbeat synced with the beat. His feet itched. His hips twitched. Somewhere deep inside him, long-dormant disco instincts stirred like a hungover demon doing the Hustle.
The door to the manager’s office cracked. Then again. A third time. From the ceiling tiles above, glitter rained down.
“Don’t move,” Jimmy Fizz whispered, his eyes darting toward the vent. “They sense rhythm. If you groove, they move.”
Randy clenched every muscle in his body to keep from popping his hip. He failed. The toe of his boot did a little tap. A quiet one.
A claw punched through the wall, meaty, nails covered with press-ons.
The hikers screamed. The wall caved in.
Velvet Talon surged through in a blaze of sequins and musky pheromones. Her eyes were pure green fire. “Let’s get sticky,” she growled.
They ran. Again. Through a busted fire door and into the kitchen. Burned popcorn and expired nacho cheese mixed with the stench of sweat and despair.
Randy grabbed a cracked vinyl chair and jammed it under the knob. “This can’t be happening. This place was shut down in the eighties!”
Jimmy wheezed. “Not shut down. Sealed. Big difference. You think the government didn’t notice seven lady sasquatches murdering tourists to the beat of the Bee Gees?”
“The military?” Randy asked. “They covered it up?”
Jimmy nodded grimly. “Operation Boogie Beast. A disco-pheromone hybridization trial, tied into early attempts at music-based mind control. Velvet Talon was Patient Zero. She was a cocktail of libido, rhythm, and primal fury. Add in roller skates and sex work rehabilitation? You’ve got a weaponized groove.”
Randy blinked. “That’s the dumbest sentence I’ve ever heard.”
“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” Jimmy snapped. “You helped launch the campaign. The posters, the promo tracks, they used your face, your voice.”
Randy stumbled backward. “No. I was just a studio flunky. I posed for one summer shoot.”
“You posed with the mirrorball,” Jimmy said.
They reached the storage room. Randy collapsed against a stack of unopened crates marked FREQUENCY CONTROL – CLASSIFIED. Inside, broken headphones, shattered vinyls, cracked test equipment.
“I thought it was all marketing fluff,” Randy muttered. “Disco mind control? Come on.”
But something caught his eye. He lifted an old 12-inch single with a government seal stamped across the label. The title: “Boogie No More.”
He blew off the dust. “This track was banned. Too powerful. It wasn’t designed to make people dance, it was designed to stop them. Cut the rhythm. Break the loop.”
“Like an anti-disco nuke?” Jimmy asked, staring at the vinyl. “So we play this, and it’s over?”
“We play this, and maybe we break the trance,” Randy said, trying to reach through foggy memories across time.
“But you’re the key. Velvet’s locked onto your frequency. If you spin it, maybe she’ll listen,” Jimmy said with more than a slight hint of desperation.
Outside, the lights dimmed. The beat slowed to a funeral crawl. A lone cowbell echoed through the vents like a countdown to doom.
They made their way to the DJ booth. The rink below was empty now, no dancers, no survivors. Just light fog and a pair of dismembered hiking boots rolling slowly across the floor.
Jimmy set the record on the turntable. Randy stared at the soundboard. His fingers trembled.
“She’ll come for me,” he said.
“She wants you,” Jimmy replied. “But you’ve got the beat she can’t resist. Spin it clean. Keep the tempo uneven. Break her.”
Randy swallowed. “What happens if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we boogie until our bones turn to glitter,” Jimmy said.
Randy dropped the needle.
Boogie No More started with silence. Then came a twisted bassline, off-kilter, syncopated, designed to unsettle. Every note dragged. Every beat landed wrong. It wasn’t disco. It was anti-funk.
A moan rang out from the depths of the rink.
Velvet Talon burst from beneath the bleachers, her skates cutting sparks from the boards. She spun wildly, confused. Her limbs jittered, caught between moves. Her fro trembled like a dark halo under siege.
She saw Randy.
“You traitor,” she howled, skating full speed toward the booth.
Randy spun harder. The record crackled with static and distortion, notes collapsing in on themselves like black holes of groove.
Velvet leapt.
The music shattered.
Silence.
She landed in the booth with a crash. The turntable exploded. Randy tumbled backward. Jimmy screamed.
Velvet rose from the smoke. Bloodied. Twitching. Her afro deflated slightly. She smiled.
“Nice try, Razor.”
She grabbed Randy by the collar. “You can’t kill the beat. You are the beat.”
She dragged him toward the rink.
The lights returned. The music surged again, Le Freak, louder than ever. Jimmy tried to follow, but the door slammed shut behind them.
Randy’s feet moved on their own.
One-two-step. Spin. Pop. Grind.
Around him, the sasquatch hookers reappeared, some with missing limbs, all regenerated mid-dance. They cheered as Randy was pulled into the eternal groove.
“Welcome home,” Velvet whispered.
The rink was alive again, more alive than ever.
Flashing lights. Screaming synths. Sasquatch hookers in fuchsia fur bikinis spun like living hurricanes. Fog machines belched mist that smelled like regret and bubblegum. And Randy “Razor” Romano was at the center of it all, arms flailing in time to a beat he didn’t remember learning but somehow always knew.
His body betrayed him.
He had disco in his blood. And it was killing him.
The groove took him like an undertow.
At first, Randy fought it, swinging arms, trembling knees, trying to stay upright as the beat dragged him across the rink. But somewhere in the sweat and sequins, the panic turned to rhythm. His body remembered what his soul had forgotten.
He danced.
Not like a man possessed, like a man reborn. Hips smooth, hands snapping, that old Razor swagger sliding back onto his bones like a powder-blue tux.
The Sasquatch hookers formed a circle around him, howling and grinding, their eyes glowing in sync with the pulsing lights. Velvet Talon skated in close, her gold bikini barely holding together, her breath hot with hairspray and hunger.
“You were born for this,” she purred, pressing her massive hand to his chest. “You are the beat.”
And for one glittering second, Randy believed her.
Because beneath the thump of drums and wah-wah guitars, he heard something else, something personal. A harmonic frequency buried beneath the rhythm. One he had helped create.
The Glitter Groove.
Back when he still had ideas. When he was more than a sleazy hanger-on. When he had dreams of frequencies that could move people, literally. Mind and body.
But that Randy was gone. Drowned in cocktails and contracts. Left behind like an unspun track.
This groove was a siren song. And he was crashing on the dancefloor shore.
He closed his eyes.
And then all hell broke loose.
Jimmy Fizz screamed from above.
A rope snapped. A disco ball chain cracked like thunder.
Velvet whirled away from Randy just as Jimmy dropped onto the rink like a glittering ninja, a crowbar in hand.
He swung at the disco ball.
It shuddered but didn’t fall.
Velvet shrieked, her voice two octaves too low, and the Sasquatch hookers turned on Jimmy in perfect, horrifying unison.
They surrounded him, laughing, tossing him back and forth like a squealing hacky sack.
Randy saw his chance.
He stumbled backward, toward the DJ booth, breath hitching, body drenched in sweat. The Glitter Groove throbbed in his head like a second heartbeat. The turntables called to him.
“Come on, Razor,” he muttered. “Spin or die.”
The booth was a mess, burned cables, warped vinyls, cracked lights. But the old board was still alive. Barely.
Randy dropped a disco classic onto the deck, Supernature by Cerrone. Remixed into something high-energy. Something primal. The opening drum break hit like a seizure, and the Sasquatch hookers loved it.
They spun faster. Velvet howled. Jimmy screamed.
Randy didn’t stop.
He hyped them. He mixed another track in. Tweaked the treble. Let the kick drum thump. His hands moved with godlike grace, remembering tempos he hadn’t touched in decades. He gave them the groove they craved.
And while they whipped themselves into a sweaty frenzy…
He slid in Boogie No More underneath.
Not all at once.
Just a whisper. A tremble in the low end. Discord slipping into harmony. Like poison in the punch bowl.
The dancers began to wobble. Skates clattered. Hips seized mid-swing. Velvet screeched and dropped Jimmy onto the floor, twitching.
Randy layered it deeper. Spliced the anti-groove across the breakbeat. The melody folded inward. The rink moaned. Light shattered. The crowd sagged like balloons in a house fire.
He was bleeding from the nose. Didn’t care.
He was in the mix. One last time.
The track hit full volume.
The scream of feedback was apocalyptic. Lights blew. Sparks flew from the booth. The Glitter Groove cracked, then snapped like a cursed bone.
Velvet Talon’s body convulsed, her fur smoking, her eyes wide with betrayal and, somehow, pride.
“You… remixed me…” she hissed.
Then she detonated in a burst of glitter and sequin brassiere.
The rink collapsed. Chunks of floor fell away into some infernal void lined with the contents of lava lamps and broken dreams. Randy stood firm, head down, hands on the board, his ears bleeding and the record still spinning.
He didn’t plan to leave.
He couldn’t.
The beat was part of him. And now it was ending.
Then arms were around him, yanking him back, dragging him out.
“Randy!” Jimmy shouted. “Don’t you die on a dance floor, you magnificent bastard!”
The world was melting. Sirens and cowbells screamed in reverse. Somewhere, a distant voice whispered “Y.M.C.A.” backward.
They stumbled out into the cool Oregon dawn, the rink imploding behind them in a mushroom cloud of pink fog and shattered soul.
They collapsed beside the Cadillac wreck.
Silence.
Then Jimmy shouted, “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
Randy groaned, blood dripping from both ears. “NO!”
“WE WON!”
“I KNOW! I THINK I’M DEAF!”
Jimmy wheezed and passed out.
Randy looked up at the pale sky.
Disco was dead.
But damn… it had died dancing.