by Alan Spencer
Brandy snatched the pie. “It’s about time.”
“Nobody’s going to deny you your precious dessert, honey.”
Chuck moved to the kitchen and popped the tab of a beer. He returned to the living room and spread himself out on his favorite chair. He waited for Brandy to return to the living room with a plate of her pie. The wait was punctuated by a shrill scream.
He bounded into the kitchen. “Brandy, what is it?”
Her face had lost all color. The box from the bakery had been opened. Chuck noticed the pie wasn’t a circle, but a large square cut from a much bigger pie. With a twist of his stomach, Chuck observed what Brandy had found and covered his mouth in shock. Then he said, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there’s a boob in your pie!”
The five vampires soared through the Chicago night. They hovered close together, hidden from sight by the darkness. They scoured every sector of the city. Lake Michigan. Navy Pier. The museums and night clubs and skyscrapers. The Rapid Transit System. The suburban section of Chicago that contrasted against the low-rent communities at East End, Chicago. Judging by the stillness of the night, the city wasn’t in a state of panic—yet. The possibilities far exceeded Anderson Mills, Kansas, their last conquest, the town filled with woods and hills. Last year’s slaughter was a pre-game formality. This was the big leagues. Now that they had the city memorized, they could forge ahead with tomorrow’s devastation. But first, they were going to have some fun.
The blonde vampire—nameless, created purely for looks by Ted Fuller—led the pack of vampires. They descended upon the Neo Night Club in human form and without clothes. The line outside the club gawked at what descended from the night sky. The bouncer, an Irish-American named Charlie, approached the five. “You ladies need clothes to enter here. No shirt, no shoes, no service, catch my drift? But if you want to hook up later at my apartment…”
The blonde snatched the bouncer’s neck with her claws. Her face deformed into a reptile’s, her snout convoluted, the flesh plated black, and her teeth extended as they bit down on his trachea and slurped what the jugular spat down her throat. The four others joined in, intertwining their tongues, masticating, sucking, lapping and kissing each other in their violent bloodlust for warm red blood. The blonde lifted the bouncer up by his neck and launched him across the street. The crowd dispersed immediately. Screams rocked the streets and echoed into parts of the city that had no idea the threat of monsters was so close to them.
And then an explosion rang from within the club. The front window shattered when a pelvic bone was hurled through it. Human bones served as bullets cutting through customers running from the chaos. Two eyeballs penetrated a man’s chest and spat out the other side of him. Intestines wrapped around a woman’s throat and hanged her from the street lamp. Ribs, spine, humerus, tibia, coccyx and femurs all served as anatomical shrapnel.
The blonde seized a fleeing young woman wearing a triangle-shaped, backless top. The vampire returned to human form and hugged her close to her body. She forced her tongue into the woman’s mouth, which tasted of cranberry and vodka. The woman clawed at the monster's face to escape. “Crazy bitch, no—!”
“I’ll always keep a part of you inside me.” She clamped on the woman’s tongue and reared back. The tongue tore from the stringy stump and hung limply in the vampire's mouth. She shoved the woman onto the street, her screams laced with crimson bubbling. The blonde vampire devoured the tongue, easing it down her throat.
The others went to work swooping down and wrenching heads off random partiers and spiking them back onto the road. The redhead hoisted a yellow Hummer and thrust it into four cowering friends, each college aged. They were stamped into the brick wall.
Police sirens played out against the backdrop of Chicago.
The blonde caught a shotgun blast into the side. A chunk of her spattered onto the asphalt. She lunged at the bar owner and shoved his face into her guts. “Drown inside me, baby! It’s warm just for you.”
He choked to death in minutes.
A fire broke out within Neo Night Club. Suddenly, the dead bodies on the ground jerked. The bones embedded in their heads and torsos freed themselves and flew back into the club. A man rose from the flames standing proud. The man, the star of Death Reject, otherwise known as Ray Hampton in the movie, moved on down the street content with his work.
The blonde advised him, “Tomorrow, you’ll be joined by so many more us.”
Ray was unaffected by their talk. He hid in the alley, running from the whine of enclosing police and ambulance sirens.
The five vampires took flight in unison.
There was one more item on tonight’s docket of terror.
A pin drop could be heard in the recovery unit of Heart of Chicago Medical Center. The late-night shifts were uneventful, but not this dull, Nurse Sherry Miller thought. Sherry made her rounds at midnight, and then she restocked the syringes and hypodermic needles. Since she was the new girl, the seasoned staff gave her odd jobs to fill in the downtime. Pretty soon her superiors would run out of errands for her. A ham sandwich and a diet soda waited in the fridge, and her stomach was already growling.
She reentered the main hallway. Nobody was at the nurse’s station. “What, did everybody go on break while I was in the stock room?” Sherry raised her voice. “Where is everybody?”
Sherry moved to the main station. All five nurses were lying on the floor. Dead. Desiccated. Their flesh was like parchment clinging tight to the bones, every drop of fluid and blood absent. Their mouths were pulled back in deadly screams, their leathery tongues rolled back into their throats. The desk, the main hallway, the black and white tiles, all of it blurred together in a moving kaleidoscope as the horror sank in.
An ear-drum-shattering animal call arrived: “Shraaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
A form—no two, now three, and then five—shoved open patient room doors and casually moved about the hallway. Their heads were bent forward and their spines curved as if they could race at her on all fours at any moment. Red eyes glowed bright. Flesh and blood were embedded in their teeth.
Sherry ducked into the nearest room and hid. It was room 413, Wayne Carton’s room. The patient lay in bed, a cast around his pelvis. He was gutted and picked clean of anything internal. His face was the only part of him left unscathed and even that was glazed in red.
The door was kicked from its hinges. Sherry ducked for cover behind the bed. She convulsed in terror. Sherry cowered in the corner, paralyzed. Tears rolled down from her eyes. That’s when a warm hand caressed her cheek. Blue eyes met hers. A kind human smile. A caress she hadn’t felt in months, not since her lover, Iris, left on Peace Corps assignment to Germany.
“You miss your Iris, don’t you?”
Sherry’s head snapped up at the woman. She was naked. Sherry had no chance to register the removal of her blouse and white scrubs. Flesh to flesh, warmth to warmth, their hearts could sense one another beat through the shell of each other’s bodies.
“I miss her so much.” Sherry wept. “She’s not coming back for a year.”
“It’s okay,” the woman said with long flowing black hair and perfect breasts, much like Iris’s. “You can touch me. I’ll be Iris. We all will be your Iris.”
She was enveloped by five women. They circled her. Buried her. Caressed her. Kissed her. Aroused her. Sherry melted. Fear cast aside, she was so entrenched in their bodies, she touched them back, lavished in their sex. Soon Sherry was closing in on a climax even Iris couldn’t deliver. Before she could complete her orgasm, a forked tongue forced itself through her eye and cut into her brain. Her skull was split down the middle, the others supping on what spilled from her sinuses and skull cavity.
The vampires left Sherry a dead pile and continued through the fourth floor until every patient was drained of their precious blood.
Then they flew back to Ted Fuller’s apartment.
Chapter Ten
Detective Vickers demanded Officer Baker drive faster. Time was
of the essence. He was following this investigation by the book since he felt like he was near the closing of the case. Ted Fuller was connected with the crimes at Iowa University and the stolen reels belonging to Dennis Brauman. Whatever else Ted had planned to commit to hype his films, Vickers couldn’t give him the time to perpetrate it. Officer Baker was driving him to Judge Howard Bullard’s house to argue for a search warrant.
Officer Baker was full of questions about Ted Fuller. “Is that director into smut or something?”
The detective had phoned a friend from Iowa who researched Dennis Brauman and his affiliation with the Private Film Coalition of Public Morals. “No, Ted’s a schlock horror movie director. Low budget shit. The stuff you’d see at the drive-in back in the day.”
“But that guy mentioned some of the reels were porno.”
“Yes, some of it. Not all of it, though. Dennis Brauman was a genius in some ways. He was a lawyer back in the late seventies and early eighties. He was also a self-righteous Christian. He had a son who committed suicide when he was in his early teens. Dennis believed the poor kid was influenced by a horror movie to slit his wrists. The film was about a man who could make himself bleed to the point it could fill up rooms, and the man still wouldn’t die. It was really depression that drove the kid to cut himself, a chemical imbalance, but Dennis denied the truth.
“But the twist happens after Dennis’s daughter marries Ted Fuller. Her overbearing father somehow convinces his daughter to divorce Fuller once he finds out about the kinds of questionable movies the guy makes. So after the marriage is finished, Fuller goes on to make a string of cheap horror films. I know Dennis later shuts down Fuller's movie distributor, VendCo, by accusing them of tax evasion. Then Dennis hires some thugs to steal VendCo’s films, and they’re lost for decades, until now, that is. Nobody cared to take legal action because the person who owned the rights was in jail, and the guy who owned the company was flat-out broke. And now, Ted’s discovered Dennis’s movie stash. He has his movies back. One of them is Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at the Funeral Home.”
“These titles.” Baker laughed under his breath. “Where do they come up with this shit?”
“People like sex and death,” Vickers speculated. “It’s a horror movie’s bread and butter. Professor Maxwell from Iowa University was the man who unearthed Ted Fuller’s film. They played it at Denton Hall, and you know the rest. Real-life flying vampires slaughter a group of people. And it happened here too.”
Baker asked, "Did you hear about the suicide bomber?”
“Suicide bomber?”
“It was two blocks from Heart of Chicago Medical Center. A man just up and blew himself up. They still haven’t identified the person. Seven people died. I have a friend in forensics. He said the wounds weren’t from an explosive device.”
“Then what killed them?”
“The guy said they were from bones, like the man’s body turned into a weapon or something.”
“Surely it’s happened before. A person blows themselves up and a few bones might land in a nearby bystander, right?"
“He said it wasn’t like that. There was no evidence of an actual bomb being used.”
“You’re saying the man just blew up on his own.”
“That’s what Wesley said.”
“They hire anybody to work crime scenes nowadays in Chicago, don't they?”
They arrived at Judge Bullard’s two-story colonial house. The front porch light was on, and the man stood on his porch wrapped in a black overcoat. He smoked a pipe. Judge Bullard wasn’t pleased. Vickers hurried out of the car and told Baker to stay behind. Baker didn’t argue.
Bullard greeted Vickers. He was near three hundred pounds, a face taken over by a full black beard—clearly dyed since his eyebrows were gray and so was his receding hair. The bags around the man’s eyes and the stamped-in frown urged Vickers to get to the point.
“I’m so sorry for waking you up. I had to break through a lot of red tape to get a hold of you. Yes, I’m out of my jurisdiction, but crimes have been happening in Chicago that are out of the norm. Ted Fuller is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iowa, and there’s more on the way. He lives only twelve miles from your home, in fact. I have to have a search warrant. He’s planning something big.”
“I heard about what happened in Iowa,” Judge Bullard said gruffly. “It’s quite the fantastic tale. You seem quite taken with it. Do you believe movies can come to life?” Bullard coughed on the next toke of his pipe. “Well, do you, Detective?”
“No, no I don’t. It’s the exact opposite. You see, Ted Fuller was a prolific film maker in the late seventies. He had ten movies under his belt. They were all seized by Dennis Brauman over three decades ago. You see, Dennis Brauman’s security locker was broken into last night. There were claw marks on the lockers and two severely injured security guards—one murdered, in fact—in the same fashion as those that died in Iowa.”
“So what are you saying, Vickers? That monsters did this?”
“No." He was losing patience with the judge, who obviously wasn’t concerned about his findings. “We have a copycat killer. Fuller, or a cult affiliated with Fuller, has taken it upon themselves to mimic the killings from the movies. Real people are perpetrating these crimes, and they’re inspired by the man’s movies. Now that the rest of the man’s reels are stolen, what will they copy next? Fuller’s hiding something, and it would be of assistance to my investigation if I could receive a search warrant.”
“I need further corroboration with a detective in my jurisdiction to confirm what you told me first." Bullard rubbed at his tired eyes. “I don’t like being woken up so late. You’re in a hurry, Detective, to catch your culprit. I’ve been put on notice recently for signing too many search warrants under duress. Tomorrow, I’ll have the chief assign you a detective—not an officer—to confirm your concerns, and then you’ll get that warrant. You have to play ball like everybody else, Vickers.”
“By then it might be too late! These are desperate circumstances.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. I make the calls in this city. Now goodnight. Get some rest, Detective. You need it. Please be reasonable. These roadblocks are set in place for a reason.”
Vickers reserved the urge to shout in the man’s face. The sick feeling rose up his throat. He knew that people would die in the name of police procedure.
Fuck it. I have probable cause. What will Fuller do if I simply knock on his door and ask to come in?
He apologized to Judge Bullard and returned to the police cruiser. Baker awaited the verdict. Vickers huffed. “No warrant. He wants corroboration from another detective before I pursue this further. Do me a favor and drop me off at 121st and Front Street. My hotel is a block from there. I need to clear my head.”
Baker obliged. “Yes sir.”
Baker dropped him off at the street corner close to his hotel. Vickers said goodnight to the officer and began walking. The moment of silence on the sidewalk was instantly shattered. Fleets of police cruisers sped towards the local hospital. Fire engines wailed as well as cop cars.
“What in the hell’s going on?”
Up the street, three police cruisers surrounded a business on the corner. Peggy Sue’s Bakery Creations. He was curious, but he decided to let the cops do their job. He was too worked up for sleep, so he planned to check out his hunch.
He walked the four blocks to Ted Fuller’s apartment building.
At apartment 4E, he knocked on the door. Vickers felt confident that if he didn’t provoke the man, he’d at least receive some insight into Fuller’s character. Was he hiding something in the apartment, or was he really a victim of circumstance? There was the possibility a group of fans took it upon themselves to copycat his films. The man hadn’t worked in the film industry for almost three decades. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Ted Fuller was also over fifty years old.
Maybe I am jumping to conclusions.
He waite
d for a response to his knocks.
Vickers knocked again.
You have to be home, Ted. It’s one o’clock. Rude awakening.
“Are you in there, Mr. Fuller?”
The voice was roused from a deep sleep, or the man was injured. The words were soft, muted, and dazed. “Help me…help…me…”
Vickers turned the doorknob. The door swung open. He entered the living room carefully. Two projectors stood in the center of the room. Furniture and picture frames had been removed to create a blank wall. The projectors hummed, spitting out a blank yellowish white circle. He continued searching through the empty kitchen, the bathroom, and finally the bedroom, where Ted Fuller lay on his bed in a useless pile. Bite wounds had crusted over his naked torso and neck. He was paler than his sheets, a pitiful, helpless expression etched on his face.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Ted blathered nonsense. “I didn’t know they would come back. I thought it was my imagination. I armed myself with a shotgun. But they overtook me. The movies…they’re coming to life. They're going to kill us all. I, I didn't mean for this to happen.”
Vickers kneeled beside him. “Take it easy. Who’s doing this?”
“Destroy the projectors,” he begged. “You know about Andy Ryerson, don’t you? The only survivor from the Anderson Mills Massacre. Andy played those horror reels in town, and they came to life and murdered everyone. Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at the Funeral Home, that reel itself was possessed a year ago. The ghosts stayed in the reels waiting to be played again. They plan a takeover on a massive level. It’s already begun. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Please believe me, I didn’t kill anybody. I never wanted this to happen.”
Ted pointed at the shotgun on the floor. “Use it against them. Shoot the projectors. Do it before they come back!”
Vickers retrieved the weapon and cradled it, confused and staring at the entrance and the windows. “Who’s coming back?”