by Alan Spencer
Chapter Fifteen
The buxom vampire beauties added another reel onto the living room projector. The redhaired vixen couldn’t resist the title and its possibilities: Slasher Girls.
Chained hand and foot, blindfolded, Harry Fallwell was walked through a dank corridor of moldy stale air. Drips echoed from overhead. He was underground, maybe near the sewers. Behind him, he listened to the conversation of his captors.
“Today’s a big day for you, Marlene,” a husky, deep woman’s voice said, one afflicted by heavy doses of alcohol and chain smoking. “I have charts, files and hard evidence of who you are. This isn’t an orphanage for estranged girls. Yes, I’ve raised you and fifty others, but the truth is, I’ve saved you from being aborted.”
“Oh no,” he whispered, the pang in his chest as sharp as a knife. “Oh shit.”
“Quiet,” the woman demanded. She yanked on the back of his hair. “Haven’t you done enough, Dr. Fallwell? You’ve aborted hundreds of unborn women. We have rights. Women have the right to choose. You pressured them. You wanted to abort them. You get off on women’s suffering!”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, I’m a doctor. Yes, I’ve performed abortions, but my practice is sensitive and caring to its clients. We educate on birth control methods, offer counseling sessions, and I always find out for certain if a woman wants to abort her child. I think you have the wrong guy. I haven’t done anything to you people. Why have you kidnapped me?”
His skull thunked when the wooden baton struck his head. Harry stumbled to his knees, crying out as painful stars shined in his eyes. Blood raced down his head. He managed one last comment before his mouth was duct-taped shut. “You women are crazy!”
“A woman sticks up for herself,” the husky woman said, “and you consider her crazy? I bet you think women are inferior to you. You think it’s funny we can vote, hold down jobs, decide if we want children, and if we don’t want to fuck you when you want it, you think we’re prudes—or you’ll call us sluts anyway! We’re the ones infected by your testosterone disease. Your seed sows our fate. It changes our lives. You can walk out anytime you want and leave us with your burdens. Dr. Fallwell, you’re as guilty as any man out there. This school I’ve started is designed to take you out one-by-one, and we will. It’ll take extreme measures for equality, but we’ll get there. One day, men will fear sex.”
Harry could sense he was passing by rooms, as he walked on blindly. Throughout the rooms, chains rattled, whips cracked, glass shattered and flesh burned. Men howled in pain. Shrieking.
Then he heard knives raked against carving stones. The muffle of gunfire at a firing range.
“Marlene, all of us were saved from being aborted. We stormed clinics like Harry’s and saved you from being extracted from the womb. We helped your mother raise you, your real mother, Marlene. She’s ready to meet you. You thought you were an orphan, but we were shaping you and your mother. You two will make the perfect team. Society will finally be as it should, with men crumbling at our feet.”
A door opened, the bottom scraping against concrete. Harry was tied to a wall, his hands above his head, legs shackled to the floor. His blindfold was removed. He turned to the wall behind him. A target was painted in what looked like human blood. He was standing in some kind of firing range. To the left and right of him, men were chained up as he was, many dead, chock full of holes from bullets and unknown implements.
He noticed the two women he assumed had brought him here. Jerry couldn’t see them clearly, but he caught the older woman hand the younger one a dagger.
“You know where to throw it, Marlene.”
“Nooooooooo!”
“Become one of us. You’ll meet your mother. Everything will be as it was supposed to be before men turned society upside down.”
“Pleeeeeeeease noooooooooooo”
“Marlene, you are now one of the Slasher Girls. Now throw the knife where it counts. He won’t be a man much longer…”
Vickers aimed his shotgun and released a round into the nearest vampire. The black-haired woman’s chest caved in, fluids spattering out her back. Her scream was limited by gurgling. She landed on all fours and stopped moving. Rushing forward, he untied Fuller from the bed. The man was naked, but he scrambled to throw on a pair of jeans and a shirt wadded up on the floor. Fuller stood up, visibly breathing hard in the projector’s light. A scene of a man stalking a screaming couple was displayed. The attacker’s head split in two, the man’s brains chewing and biting at the air with teeth and a pair of ogling eyes.
Fuller bounded forward to kick the projector to its side when four of the vampires entered the room. Vickers backed up in the corner. He attempted to fire another round, but the gun was empty.
“Shit!”
Fuller opened the window. “Quick, the fire escape! We don’t have a choice.”
Vickers urged Fuller to go first. Now he clutched the shotgun as a bludgeon. “You stay away from me, you crazy bitches. I don’t know who you are or how you’ve pulled it off, but you’ve murdered dozens of innocent people.”
“Is that all?” The blonde was disappointed. “It’s been more than that, and they all bled like stuck pigs and tasted just as sweet. And you won’t be any different than the other swine when I bite into your flesh…or whatever else is out there that will do the biting for me.”
Vickers couldn’t battle them in the room. The most brutal of tactics couldn’t bring down the bizarre foe. Fuller was already down to the first floor and safer than him. Vickers gave him five seconds to flee the scene. Then he heaved the shotgun at the vampires and jumped through the open window onto the fire escape landing. His trench coat caught on something inside, and he instinctively slipped out of it completely and left it behind. Down the metal stairs, he pumped his arms and legs as fast as he could—fear of slipping and falling be damned! He turned his gaze upward to check for any aerial assaults. He was surprised they didn’t come. But the vampires laughed, the piercing shrieks and cackles of celebration. The notes carried higher and higher. Vickers couldn’t help but feel like he’d made a mistake.
The vampires wanted him out of the apartment.
They were victorious.
He touched down onto the alley. Ted Fuller waited eagerly and wide-eyed behind a garbage bin. He was gaunt, white-lipped and drained of energy, but something had given him strength to escape the apartment.
Vickers stared up at the sky again; they weren’t pursing them. He checked his watch. “It’s noon right now. And it’s pitch black.”
“You didn’t watch the movie,” Ted said. “In Bone Dome, a giant skull sits over a city. The city fights to escape as the air is slowly used up. The sun is gone, you see.”
“You can’t be serious.” Vickers rubbed at his tired eyes. His sense of disbelief was ever-expanding, as was his migraine. “This can’t be real, yet there it is, the sky is blocked by bone. Maybe it’s bone, maybe it’s not, but there it is. And those women upstairs, they’re the ones who killed everybody at Iowa University. Christ, I had you pegged for the killings. I thought you were using special effects. Or maybe it was a cult following of yours.”
“I have no following.” Ted failed to restrain his bitterness. “I never did. Everybody was out to shut me down.”
Panic echoed from unseen corridors of the city. Screams. Faint words, perhaps warnings. Cars crashing. Guns blasting. Glass shattering. Buildings crackling with fire. Explosions.
“We better head to police headquarters,” Vickers suggested. “It’ll be safe there.”
“No, the law can’t help us now. We’re destroying the projectors and the reels. I brought them back. I didn’t think it would work. But you saw them with your own eyes.”
Vickers seized both his shoulders and shook him hard. “Why did you bring them back?”
“I stole my movie at Iowa University,” Ted admitted. “I wanted my movie back. That’s the only reason I came to the viewing. But one of the vampires told me t
hey could give me the rest of my movies back too. They said they were hidden only blocks from where I lived. So I plugged in a projector and played the film. The truth is, the reel is possessed by ghosts, and all I know is they used magic of some sort to take the images from the movies and turn them into real life.
“Andy Ryerson survived the first attack. Have you heard of the Anderson Mills Massacre? A whole town is dead and nobody can say why. And not just dead, but mutilated, drained of blood, the works—something straight out of a horror movie, literally.”
Vickers was confused. The line between real and unreal and outright ludicrous had been blurred. The evidence surrounded him. The dome over the city and the vampires and the hideous deaths. His investigative skills were useless in this crazy world.
“Then what do you suggest we do?”
Ted pondered the question. He kept rubbing his wrists, a solid raw line embedded in the flesh from his captivity. “We burn the building down. The reels will go up with the place. There’s an auto body garage down the street. Maybe they have something we can set a fire with.”
“What about the people in the building?”
“Set the fire alarms before we start the fire.”
“How about starting it in your apartment,” Vickers said. “I’m not allowing anybody else to be hurt. Enough is enough. I won’t be responsible for any more bloodshed.”
“No, you’re right. Enough people have died already because of this.”
Vickers shook hands with Ted. “I’m sorry I thought you were a murderer.”
“Buy me a drink when this is over, and we’re square.”
The two retreated to Steven’s Auto Body and Salvage two blocks south of the apartment building in search of flammable materials.
Chapter Sixteen
Roger Patrick clutched the steering wheel of his yellow cab. He’d sped back and forth between Maywood and Englewood Park, traveled to Melrose Park, and taken outlets throughout the city all the way to East End to pick up random travelers and stranded victims and transport them to Navy Pier to safety. There, many took shelter in the shops at the strip malls along the harbor. Medical units had been set up as well alongside armed barriers by the police who tried to form a front against what lurked throughout Chicago.
No traffic, he cruised at fifty on the streets where he rarely reached fifteen in the past. A Remington shotgun sat propped across his lap, and it reminded him every second he was in danger. He’d already blasted five rounds from his window. His right passenger door was missing. A preacher cackling and spouting gibberish he couldn’t understand had removed the door with a huge magnet. After shooting at the crazed preacher, Roger watched him aim the magnet in a new direction, toward a throng of fleeing people. The preacher removed dozens of their skeletons via the magnet’s pull. Roger couldn’t understand how it was possible, but he’d seen skeletons rattle across his windshield and nearly send him crashing into the sidewalk.
Roger hooked a left onto 89th Street, keeping an eye out for anything. He kept his brights on despite the fear of giving himself away. The shotgun offered as much courage as the bottle of half-spent bourbon at his feet.
Corpses were strewn on the sidewalks as well. Many of them were faceless, their heads emptied of contents. Rough gouges marked where teeth carved up the features and worked through the sinuses to suck out the brains. He’d seen devilish eyes glower at him as something chewed a pregnant woman’s face and worked through the belly for another brain to eat.
Keep your eyes open for victims. You have to keep saving people. The police can’t do it. The majority of the survivors are too scared to leave Navy Pier, and the blockade won’t protect them from jack shit if any of these monsters find out where they are.
A series of hotels unfolded to his left and right: The Hilton, Holiday Inn, Trevor Turlington Suites and a slew of lower-end places. This sector was fairly untouched. No enemies attacked from the sky or the ground. His beams crossed on a woman sitting on the sidewalk with her head in her hands. Her shoulder blades shook; she was weeping. Roger immediately pulled over.
“Hop in, sweetie,” Roger said in the most soothing voice he could dredge up. “I’ll take you to safety. Navy Pier sound okay? They have food, shelter, cops and a place to rest.”
She was attractive and was dressed like a schoolgirl. Plaid miniskirt. Button-up white dress shirt. Black tie. Black tote bag. Silky auburn hair styled in a pony tail. Though her face was unflinching, her eyes were blackened by streaming mascara from a long cry.
Was she on her way to class when this happened? The nearest school is miles from here.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Roger insisted, “but I have to keep moving. Anything could come at us at any moment. I promise I’ll take you to Navy Pier.”
She agreed, standing up, and entered the backseat. He got a better look at her in the rearview mirror. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-two. Ninety-five pounds. Her buttons had come undone revealing the topmost half of her breasts, which glowed with a sheen of sweat. She reminded him of a cross between a Valley girl and a frat boy’s girlfriend.
Roger politely turned his eyes back to the road. “Are you hurt? I don’t know your name.”
“I didn’t throw it,” she said in a surprisingly cutting voice. “You’re looking at me, aren’t you?”
“I was checking for injuries,” Roger said, half-lying. “I apologize if I offended you. It’s been a heck of a day.”
She spread her legs. “You want to see my snatch, is that it? Are you some kind of pervert?”
“What? No, please understand me. I’m not trying to—”
“The last guy who gave me half the glances you did ended up buried in my backyard." Her teeth were bared in a wicked sneer. Her beauty was marred by the hatred twisting her face. “And you were looking at my tits. Sizing them up. Imaging how they feel. You’d rape me, wouldn’t you? Violate me. Use this panic situation to get your dick wet, you piece of shit, wouldn’t you? I’ve met your kind, and I’ve taught them a lesson. They’ll never look at a girl’s chest again—not without eyes, or a head, or a dick!”
He slammed on the brakes. “Get out of my car, you crazy bitch. Don’t threaten me. I’m risking my life to save your ass. I wasn’t going to do a damn thing to you. I’m only trying to take you to Navy P—”
“Die, you scumbag!”
She reached into her tote bag and removed a short samurai sword. She jammed the blade through the seat, an inch of it cutting into his kidney. He stopped the car. Before he could twist around and aim the shotgun at her, she rolled out the door screaming, “What do you want cut off next, your big head or your little head? And being a man, your answer will have to be more specific!”
From the left, he counted twenty—no thirty—no, now fifty schoolgirls in checkered plaid miniskirts, pig tails, high-heeled, black polished dress shoes, and tight-fitting button-up tops without bras charging the taxi. Each raised a mix of swords, maces, double-edged axes, clubs with nails jammed through them—way too large for anybody to be carrying, yet the women brandished them without difficulty—scythes, sickles, hammers and railroad spikes.
“I want to wear his balls around my neck.”
“Pulverize him.”
“I’ll feed his dick to my Doberman.”
“I’ll shove my mace up his ass—or maybe he’d like that. Creeps like him are always closet perverts!”
“Make him shit blood, and then we’ll see how much he enjoys a mace up his ass.”
“Try a dynamite dildo!”
Holy fucking shit, these chicks are insane!
Roger clutched the wheel with bloody hands. He pounded the gas. “Move, you piece-of-shit! MOVE!”
The car jolted forward, leaving behind the small fleet of armed slasher schoolgirls in the cloud of his exhaust.
Chapter Seventeen
Jessica was holed up in the fifth floor of Corporate Tower, a skyscraper filled with offices and businesses. The window in her corner office ga
ve a perfect view of the strange shell over the city. It was thick and the color of white enamel. The city was blocked out, isolated from the rest of the world, and left in darkness. Below, strange things were happening. The way it sounded, Jessica would’ve believed monsters paraded below.
The radio station had been replaced by a repeating message: Do not attempt to leave shelter for any reason. The Chicago Police Department will attend to anybody in the streets or separated from their families and loved ones. We repeat, stay indoors. Anyone found roaming the streets will be detained.
The majority of the office workers had left for home.
Billy said he’s coming. I can’t leave. What if he shows up and I’m gone? What if he’s arrested?
Jessica pressed her hands against the window. The image in her mind kept repeating the strange helmet shape floating in the air, suspended by nothing, and then touching down on the city. The foundation of the city had been jostled upon its landing.
She stared at Billy’s picture in the frame on her desk. They were hugging each other at Shedd Aquarium in front of a bottle-nosed dolphin. Her favorites were the tiger and hammerhead sharks. The aquarium was almost like being underwater: the dark muted walls and the gurgle and bubbling from the tanks. The fun-loving good time had been replaced by martial law and encroaching death. She prioritized her life in seconds. She wanted to get married, buy a house, and after passing the bar exam, she’d have children. Maybe Billy would go back to school first, and then they’d live the dream.
Right now, the dream was being sucked dry of air. She could feel it happen in her lungs already. The air was thinning. Sweat constantly dripped down her body. What would the quality of air be like in hours?—days? Would they make it for days?
She was distracted by a shuffle outside her office door.
Oh shit, someone’s here.
I thought I was alone.