by Alan Spencer
She lifted the closed shade of her window and peered into the hallway. It was Steve Allan. He was a paralegal like her. He wore his iPod, oblivious to everything that was happening. He carried a stack of files. Jessica stopped him as he passed by her office. She made him remove his headphones.
“Don’t you know what’s going on?”
Steve shook his head. “What, did everybody go to lunch?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“No,” Steve said. “I have three tests to study for. Mr. Bruner’s environmental law test, for one, and then Mr. Burke’s—”
“Forget the exams!” She guided him to the window in her office. “You see that?”
Steve looked outside, turning his head slightly to one side. He stumbled on words, beginning a sentence and then giving up over and over again.
Finally, he gasped, “No way. When did this happen? Everybody left me making copies. The fuckers. They would leave me here.” Steve was confused. “Why are you still here?”
“My boyfriend is on the way.”
“Oh.”
A random scream interrupted them. “You gotta help me!”
Jessica’s back tensed. Every inch of her skin heated up. The sound was so out of place in the quiet office atmosphere, it shook them both. Steve raced into the hall toward the bathrooms. “It came from the men’s bathroom, I think.”
She followed behind Steve, who propped the bathroom door open. An arc of artificial light painted the tiles. The arc touched the edge of a black boot.
“Don’t open the door any more,” a deep, gruff voice warned. Pain edged each syllable. The man was holding back agony. “Please, I don’t want you to see me. My body has a mind of its own. Shoot me now. Kill me. Any way you see fit. I’d prefer if you shot me between the eyes. Make it final. Make me dead.”
Steve turned to Jessica, both of them perplexed. Jessica softened her voice. “Why would you want us to do that to you? If you’re hurt, we’ll get you to the hospital. It doesn’t matter what’s going on or how much you hurt. Don’t give up. We’re only blocks from the hospital.”
“Yeah,” Steve piped up. “There’s no need for talk like that, man. What happened to you, man?”
He pushed open the door another inch.
“No—don’t!”
It was too late. The man was splayed on the floor. He was over three-hundred pounds. Powdered sugar white skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow. Fingernails purple. Hair long and black, but he was bald on top. Lips had no color. He wore a red vest. A circle of wet blood where his navel would be. The wound had bled over his black pants and flowed over dozens of square tiles. But the most disturbing sight, more so than the glossy red blood, was his distended belly. A cauldron could’ve been stuffed in his abdominal cavity. The belly bulged so tight it stretched to near tearing.
Steve couldn’t hide the disgust in his words. “What is…what’s wrong with you, man?”
“It’s too late now, you idiot,” the man laughed. Ripe spittle foamed at both edges of his lips. The blood at his navel spurted down his legs, pooling. “I have no control over my actions anymore. My thoughts, my ambitions, my self-control, I own none of them. Once I see you, IT WANTS YOU DEAD!”
Jessica’s intuition shot her from the bathroom. She expected Steve to be right behind her, but he stood in the door in shock. Hands at his sides.
She stopped and shouted, “Steve, get away from that man!”
Blood spattered the tiles in gallon loads, skin shredded—it made her insides clench to hear it—and then a projectile wrapped around Steven’s throat. Like rope, but it was pink, and glistening, and visceral.
“Steve!” she screamed. She was rooted in place, fearing if she helped him she too would be lassoed by the bizarre weapon. “Let him go, whoever you are.”
“I can’t control it,” he tittered darkly. “I can’t be held accountable for who I kill. I was born this way. I have the biggest guts of them all. They’re five miles long and growing.”
Steve’s face was a violent shade of purple. His eyes stewed in their sockets on the verge of exploding out of his head. Tapeworm veins streaked across his features.
“Gaaaaackgraaaaghgaaaaaack!”
“My intestines have an intuition.” The man continued to weave his tale. “They know who deserves to die. God gave them to me for a reason. I am God's vessel. They nuked me with A-bomb juice, but it was God who instilled this power in me. My guts are the judge, jury and executioner. I have no control over them, but oh, how I like to watch you die. It gives me great pleasure!”
The man’s face had changed from genuinely apologetic to seething with abominable evil.
“LET HIM GO! YOU’LL KILL HIM!”
The man’s words were hate-filled. “The guts reap your innermost thoughts from the flesh. They know your past, your sins, the evil you’re capable of committing to others! I AM THE INTESTINATOR!”
The intestines audibly coiled tighter over Steve's throat. Steve’s eyes bled. His nose, ears and mouth dribbled pink froth. His head quaked. With the sound of thick roots breaking earth, his head was snapped from the neck. Blood shot to the ceiling and rained back onto the headless victim. Steve’s head was pitched at Jessica. She ducked in time. Shattered glass from the office window behind her marked her attempt at fleeing, each step a crunch. She screamed uncontrollably. The shadows flickered and spun around her. The viscera was suspended in the air like a long snake jutting out of the maniac’s navel.
Jesus Christ, Steve’s head, he ripped it off.
That man’s guts ripped Steve’s head off!
She hadn’t seen the man before; he was a complete stranger. He wasn’t a client, at least not a recent one. How were intestines capable of ripping a man’s head off? He would do the same to her. Her head would be the next rolling on the floor.
Jessica’s retreat was blind and random for the first ten seconds. The man’s pursuit, on the other hand, was calculated and confident. Jessica felt the rush of wind as the intestines propelled themselves, swiping, bending and reaching for her. They touched her hair. The contact was brief and left a glob of sticky substance behind.
She ran even faster. She forced open the fire exit door and launched down the steps. Three floors below, she could run outside to safety, to fresher air if fresh air still existed.
Would the man chase her until she was dead?
Jessica kept charging down the stairs and prayed she beat the monstrosity out of the building.
Chapter Eighteen
The blonde vampire clutched the dark-haired vampire in her arms. She bled heavily from the shotgun wound she'd taken earlier. She gagged and coughed on fluids, but she smiled through the damage. “I’m not going to die. I’ll come back as something else. Quick, play another movie! We’ll send them all to hell with us.”
The blonde sucked the tips of her fingers, relishing every drop of blood staining them. “Yes, to hell with them,” she laughed. She licked the woman’s chest, digging her tongue into the wound and sucking the delectable juices from the upturned meat. “Our magic is unstoppable. Ghosts of the dead have known magic for centuries, and now we have crafted a way to bend reality, to recycle the dead into new bodies. The more we kill, the more ways we will find to bend reality. Magic practiced by thousands will surely be amazing. You won’t die, my sweet. If this is the only way we can exist among the living, then so be it.”
The dying woman whispered, “I was Anne Jenkins before I died. I used to be a homemaker. I made peanut butter and jellies for snot-nosed brats. My husband remarried six months after I died. He didn’t bother to visit my grave and neither did my son or daughter. Death opened up my eyes. The living don’t deserve the skin they wear. They have no idea how lucky they are. They had their chance to appreciate a beating heart. The afterlife is horrible. All we get to do is watch the living squander their mortality.”
The blonde nodded, petting back a strand of dark hair from the dying woman’s face. She kissed the former Anne Jenkin
s on her bloody forehead. “My name was Georgia. I had my throat cut in an alley sucking off a client. The second he finished, he jammed the blade of a carrot peeler into my neck. I turned tricks in a small Podunk town called Humansville, ironically. Nobody found my body for two months. I was left in a black trash bag in the county dump. Garbage pickers found my naked ass. They stole the cocaine and twenty dollars I had in my purse before they called for help. I was aware in my dead body. In that trash bag. Two months of hot suffocating black. I still feel my body rot beneath the earth, buried in my casket. Worms and bacteria have worked through the lining of the coffin and are breaking down my flesh. I’ll never be true flesh and blood again. Never. And the living will know my agony firsthand!”
Anne coughed up a wad of coagulated blood. “So what city will we take over next?”
The other three chimed in:
“How about New York?”
“Boston?”
“Philadelphia?”
The blonde pointed at the projector. “That’s not important yet. We have to worry about those two assholes coming back for us. They might try and destroy the projectors. I think Ted knows too much.”
“Nobody will stand a chance,” the auburn-haired vampire said. “I’ll rip their heads from their shoulders and bathe in their blood.”
“Feed the projector another film,” Georgia demanded. “Let’s bring you back to life, Anne. I’ll play a few more reels, and you can pick the one you like best…”
Psychologist and hypnotist Naga Surie clutched his patient’s head. His patient sat on the dark red leather chair in his office. The woman in his hands was in her early thirties, suffering from nervous stress. Naga played his fingers along her skull, tracing each region of the brain.
He was looking for the trigger.
“Mrs. Turner, I will unlock the part of your brain that’s hardwired these behaviors. You’ve lost your job at the post office because you have to trace the zip codes with a pen over and over to the point you tear the paper. Your husband says you check the oven fifteen times a night to make sure the burners are off. You can’t leave the house without double checking the locks for twenty minutes. These behaviors have rendered a normal life, well, implausible.”
Mrs. Turner wept. “I’m not happy. I don’t have a life. It's, it's a living hell.”
He massaged the occipital region of her skull. “You’ve been to five other psychologists who haven’t been able to crack the code of your behaviors. These are so hardwired and entrenched in the brain, it's near impossible to cure. There’s a practice in the Middle East called ‘unplugging’. It’s an ancient art that’s not practiced in the mainstream. Imagine your brain’s like a machine. You shut it down. Turn it on and turn it off. You’ll come back the way you were before your disorder took hold.”
“Please,” Mrs. Turner begged. “I’ll do anything to be normal again. Can you really change me?”
Naga smiled. “Absolutely.”
He traced her skull with his fingers. She was relaxed. She moaned lightly, eyes closed and visibly rolling against her eyelids.
Naga traced the edges of her skull cap and finally located it. The special massage unlocked what he called “the mind’s trigger”; it resembled a cyst.
He flicked it on and issued a silent prayer.
Mrs. Turner passed out. “Ohhhhhhh…”
Suddenly, her face split down the middle. The skull cap cracked and forked and was spit out in brittle pieces. The brain came alive, a set of long and sharp teeth surrounding the soft tissue in a protective shell.
“I did the ritual correctly. I followed the rules!” Naga exclaimed.
Mrs. Turner screamed with her lips on two separate sides of her head. “What’s happening to me?”
“I’m so sorry! The brain is a powerful storehouse of knowledge. Many secrets are trapped in the cerebral cortex that we have no idea about. I’ve unlocked the way to cure people of their hardwired behaviors, but there’s the risk of bringing about the demon. Everybody has two guiding systems, a human being, and the second, a more primitive, evil monster. This evil monster fulfills what your morality and guilt and conscience keep you from committing. Sex, murders, anything that you’ve withheld yourself from committing in life, the monster locked in your brain will see it through.”
“You lied to me!” the brain growled, four octaves deeper than Mrs. Turner’s voice. “You’re a louse, a fucking liar! I’ll rip the tongue out of your lying mouth and shit it down your throat. Your ethics are shit. Now people will smell your corruption with every word you speak.”
The brain monster sucked up Naga's cranial matter in three voracious gulps.
Georgia laughed hysterically as the reel played on. She finally watched the part of the movie where the woman rips out Naga’s tongue and defecates it down his throat. She skimmed her finger along the dusty tins of movies. “Ah yes, another one. Anything to achieve more victims!”
Georgia chose The Plow Man:
Dean Marlow shoved a large tube down the open manhole. Toxic waste was delivered into the sewers. The steaming gook splashed onto his steel-toed boots. “Ah shit. I bet you're having a laugh over this one, Hank.”
“Hank Brundage?” Chris Leer joined Dean, holding the tube straight as more caustic fluids poured out. “That stupid fucker?”
“Hank could barely tie his shoes, never mind wipe his ass,” Dean chuckled. With his free hand, he took a nip of whiskey from a fifth and shared it with Chris. He tapped the ground with his foot. “That’s why I had to let him go.”
“Yeah, we buried that retard in the foundation,” Chris guffawed, whiskey spilling down his chin. “He was napping on a break when we were pouring the concrete. He didn’t wake up long enough to scream. I bet he thought the concrete was a water bed.”
“Nobody’s found the dumb bastard. I saw his orange hard hat. The last thing I saw of ol’ Hank Brundage. His family wasn’t upset. His mother and father were happy to be rid of the extra baggage.”
“And I’m not going to jail over a retard.”
“Me either.”
“I’m glad we joined up with the waste disposal service,” Chris said. “I mean, I liked being in business with you, but construction’s a lot of work.”
“This ain’t shit,” Dean said. “It’s toxic waste. Leftover napalm and agent orange and the shit they use to dust crops. It’s a helluva cocktail. Mean shit. Eat your insides out. Have you popping with cancers too ugly to name.”
“You got it on your shoe, buddy.”
“It can’t go through leather, dumb ass.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“The toxic honey wagon’s empty. Let’s get a move on. Both me and you know this is illegal.”
Chris narrowed his eyes and scratched his head. “Yeah, that’s why we’re paid the big bucks.”
The truck drove away, leaving a jet of fumes and dripping a chemical cocktail onto the street in its wake. Across the street, steam issued through the cracks of the new construction site. Jackhammers suddenly propelled themselves, pounding through the earth six at a time. Deeper chunks of rock exploded, so deep, Hank Brundage’s corpse was uncovered, dried up, curled in a fetal position. Chemical steam hovered over the corpse. The eyes came open. Yellowed. Fat had issued through the flesh in a white milky substance. His permanent scream suddenly shifted into a smile. Hank adjusted his hardhat and headed over to the steamroller. The steamroller had always been his favorite; he owned replicas of them as a kid and kept them on a display shelf in his room at his parents’ house.
In the backseat of the rig, he noticed a double-barreled shotgun.
The steamroller started on its own.
In a voice as sharp as gravel, Hank said, “Looks like my ride is here…”
Anne vanished into smoke, as did the blood that had stained the carpet beneath her body. Georgia smiled, reassured the next reel would resurrect her fallen brethren. She played 500 Foot Hooker in her honor:
Ray Johnston—Johnny Ray as friends
called him—was walking up Manhattan Drive. His two business associates, one who named himself “Rock”, the other “Silk”, were also on foot, dressed in mink coats and clutching ivory canes with sizeable diamonds on the top. Beneath the coats they wore burgundy suits. Both had seventies discothèque afros with a hair pick jutting out the side.
Johnny Ray aimed his cane in the direction of the abandoned warehouse just down the road. “Is that where we’re meeting this jive turkey? Man, I’ve got bitches waitin’ for a good bangin’. Why the hell am I here on a Saturday night? I’ve got bills to collect and booties to slap.”
“This is business,” Silk said coolly, side-stepping and spinning and breaking out in a two-step for no good reason. “This bitch is for sale, this doctor says. This is one of those good bitches. Real nice. Can shake it something sweet. We’ll make money off this piece. Melted butter on bread, my brudda.”
Johnny Ray was skeptical. “We don’t know this punk. Doctor could be a jive turkey copper.”
Rock agreed. “Yeah, he might be a cop. Do you wanna be riding piggy back to the pen?”
Silk stopped on the sidewalk. “If you don’t want a part of this business venture, then go back to your stank ass bitches. They get twenty to fifty bucks a pop if they’re good, but this bitch—this bitch, man, she’s a grand a pop. Butter dripping down your rolls, jive talkas. Now you’ve hurt my feelings. I let you in on the secret. The big event. THE BIG, fellas. Shit, you ain’t acting interested. When you set your eyes on this bitch, you’ll want to sample the product.”
Johnny Ray opened up his suit to showcase the .45 caliber pistol tucked under his arm. “This better be THE BIG.”
Rock chimed in, “Saturday nights only come once a week. The score better be good. Damn good, you get me, turkey?”
Silk guided them to the warehouse. The sign outside was faded and pocked with bullet holes. They entered the YOU RENT IT storage building.
The warehouse was dark as pitch. Johnny Ray flipped his sterling silver Zippo lighter. “Turn on the lights. I can't see.”