by Alan Spencer
The voice of a carnie announcing an attraction came from the back of the warehouse: “Welcome, my friends. I have the greatest hooker in history. Every customer will shell out the big greens for this fine lady. This genetically created and enhanced beauty will do anything I tell her, and she'll only listen to me. I will rent her out to you for—”
Johnny Ray fired a round into the dark.
“Gaack!”
The announcer audibly slipped from a staircase above and landed with the crunch of bone. Silk flipped on a lever next to an oversized breaker box and it sparked on, charged with thousands of volts of juice. “You shot that honky before he spoke his piece.”
Johnny Ray blew on the smoking barrel. “I said my piece too. That bitch is mine. Where is she? Nobody sells to the pimp. The pimp sells to them.”
The rattle of chains, the snapping of steel, and from beneath the giant tarp spread out on the floor, she came alive. Red leather stilettos. Pink fishnets. Red g-string. A tattoo of a cartoon devil on her inner thigh sucking on its forked tail. A darker red tube top housed huge breasts. Her hair was dyed electric red.
And she was two-hundred feet tall.
“You killed my pimp!” The scream tore paint and bricks from the walls. An earthquake erupted as she cried. The point of her stiletto heel impaled Johnny Ray through the midsection. She flung him off of her shoe. “Eww, gross.”
Johnny Ray was thrown twenty yards and collided into the wall.
His dying words: “Ah shit, bitch!”
Silk opened fire, producing a golden Tommy gun from his mink coat. Brat-brat-brat-brat-brat!
A fist hammered down and turned Silk into a squashed puddle of mink and guts and blood. The camera panned to a mouth coughing out a last word: “Skank.”
Rock fled the building only for the top of the warehouse to be flung into the air and crash down upon him. The woman stood, as tall as the nearby buildings. “EVERY MAN WILL DIE,” she screamed, the decibels shattering panes of glass. “EVERY MAN WILL SUFFER!”
The strawberry-blonde vampire who was once named Hillary Doeskin—who died in real life when struck by a flying stop sign during a tornado in Missouri—inserted another reel into the projector. She watched intently, enthralled by the film entitled The Pickler:
The funeral home was surrounded by the townspeople of Heatonville. Citizens stood between gravestones, the shadows of night carving their features into vicious folds of hatred. They knew Jack White’s secret. The funeral director had taken liberties with the town’s freshly dead, and tonight, he would pay.
“Come on out,” Frank Morgan, the leader of the mob, demanded. He was mayor, and his late wife, Jo-Beth, was about to become a victim of Jack White’s extracurricular activities. “Jack, we know you’re in there. You’re cutting up Jo-Beth’s body as we speak, aren’t you? You’re going to sell it to body brokers, right? For a few bucks you’ve desecrated her, you greedy son-of-a-bitch! You've desecrated them all. This is your last chance to come out before we break in and force you out.”
“Break the door down!”
“Lynch the bastard!”
“Burn the place down!”
Frank Morgan motioned for the four cops behind him to drive a battering ram through the front door. The crash of wood satisfied the crowd’s lust for revenge. Frank led the throng into the foyer. The room was empty, but the basement door was wide open.
“We know you’re down there, Jack,” Frank shouted over the din and curses. “Show yourself, or we’re coming down there. WE'RE COMING DOWN ANYWAY!”
Moments passed, the crowd growing even more violent. Frank aimed his flashlight at the basement door. There was only silence. “HERE WE COME, YOU BASTARD!”
Tommy Prichard, Dwight Meason and Melissa Dowery followed behind him. Melissa clutched a noose and Tommy and Dwight each carried a high-powered rifle. Frank didn’t care about the threat of violence surrounding him. He too wanted revenge.
The lights in the basement were suddenly turned off. “Now we know we’ve got him,” Frank rejoiced. “You’re not escaping us. You can't hide, not even in the dark.”
Frank found the switch on the wall and flipped the lights back on.
Upon their entrance, Jo-Beth was splayed on a steel gurney. Her legs were amputated at the hips. The legs themselves were iced in a foam cooler at the foot of the gurney. Her eyes were missing and so were her arms. The pale girl, “Queen Beauty of Heatonville”, was now a ruined corpse.
Jack White, the embalmer, was in his early sixties and wore an expression of calculated emotion. He didn’t want to appear too scared or too guilty. But soon, Frank watched in astonishment as the man’s face broke into a twisted grin. “Hah, hah, hah, your bodies are worth more dead than alive, you know that? What does it hurt to profit from a corpse? They don’t care. They're dead.”
Jack picked up the legs from the cooler and posed them standing, then he moved them so they seemed to walk. “They don’t give a shit. She’s dead. Fucking dead. She didn’t say no. Sure didn’t. I asked. She just froze up. Hah! Hah! Hah!”
Frank instinctively threw a punch into Jack’s face. He crashed into a box heaped with foam peanuts. Jack rose from the box, incensed, his humor wiped clean from his face. “Now how about I ship you in pieces across the state? People need these organs, you fools. My son died without a heart transplant. The dead don’t need their insides, but HE DID!”
Tommy, Dwight and Melissa closed in on Jack. Tommy snarled, “Let’s give him a taste of his own medicine.”
Melissa’s eyes bulged with fury. “I have a better idea. Let’s embalm the bastard.”
Dwight jammed a trocar needle into Jack’s mouth. “Swallow this!”
Embalming fluid was forced down Jack’s throat. “Naaaawgh!”
Melissa shoved another trocar into Jack’s torso. Then Tommy drove another into his neck. Jack was filling with chemicals. The man flung his arms, struggling to be free of the slow internal drowning. He fell to the floor, his mouth gushing embalming fluid onto the floor. The four stared at each other. Nobody spoke for moments.
“Thank the good lord he’s dead.” Tommy spat on Jack. “May you go to hell.”
Jack’s body shot up from the floor. His flesh was wet with embalming fluid. His eyes and nose dripped, his mouth seethed and his flesh exuded the substance through his sweat glands. Every word was fluid-choked. A devilish smile played on his face, carved by trails of clear fluid. “Death is chemical. Death is formaldehyde. Death is preservation. I am the new grim reaper. The voice in the shadows. The shrouded man at the gate. Now, let me touch you.”
Jack’s hands clasped Tommy’s hand. Suddenly, Tommy gagged and choked. Tommy’s jugular opened and spat out blood at such a high pressure it spattered onto the ceiling and the shocked onlookers. The embalming fluid flowed from Jack’s fingertips into the gaping jugular once it stopped spurting. Tommy was embalmed in seconds.
He flopped to the ground stone-cold dead.
“I am ‘The Pickler’,” Jack erupted in jubilation, spitting embalming fluid from his lips. “You created me, NOW FACE ME!”
Georgia had been watching the film behind Hillary’s shoulder. “Great choice, honey.”
Hillary kissed Georgia on the lips to celebrate another movie. “Death, blood, destruction, it’s all coming together. The city will suffer in terror.”
They watched out the window as the monsters they created took over the city.
Chapter Nineteen
Billy stopped at the stairs leading up to the elevated train. He wasn't sure if the system was still running despite everything. The city roared with violence, but between 11th and Tower Street, Chicago felt abandoned. They hardly encountered a single person once they fled the hospital. The apartment buildings, businesses and thoroughfares had been shut and locked and perhaps barricaded. A pair of eyes would occasionally peek through blinds to check on the state of the city, but otherwise, people were playing it safe. Fear permeated the dry air. The dome above them was gradua
lly snuffing the city’s air supply.
Nelson double-checked the road for strange people. “How much longer before you think we suffocate?”
Billy shook his head. “Let’s pretend someone on the outside of this city’s forming a plan to save our asses. It’s not the air I’m worried about just yet.”
“How do you figure?”
“Whatever murdered my father and all those people is a bigger threat. And then the man who blew himself up yesterday. Think about it. Maybe there are more of them.”
“Do you really think any human being could transport a shell that big and cover the city?”
“Well, somebody did. Who would slice and dice an entire floor of hospital patients? I still believe that guy looked too much like that damn movie to be a coincidence. Shit, I don’t know. I can't make sense of it.”
“I can't either.”
“Then let’s get going. Jessica’s alone. Let’s hope the train’s still running.”
Billy raced up the stairs, already winded halfway up. He wouldn’t be much of a hero to Jessica if he couldn’t run a block without keeling over. Who said she was in danger? She’s in a big secure building. I’m sure people are all around her. I'm the one who's in danger out here.
The platform was barren. Together, they waited for the next train to show up.
“What if the train doesn’t come?”
“It’s a solid three miles to Corporate Tower and the Crouch and Meadows offices,” Billy said. “It’s worth waiting a minute. It wouldn’t make sense to shut it down. There are innocent people still out and about who have to be carted back to their homes.”
The sound of a train broke the silence. It had to be two or three blocks from them. Billy’s nerves crested. He paced. Wind slipped through cracks of the wooden platform, whistling. He couldn’t erase the image of his father’s bloody face.
Nelson had been eying him for a time. “What are you thinking about?”
Billy felt the pang of tears coming. He wiped them away, pretending to be fighting fatigue. “My dad. He’s really gone. It hasn’t truly set in until now. I wish I hadn’t seen his dead body. It’s going to stay with me forever. The police wouldn’t tell me anything. It’s their fault I had to charge into that crime scene. I freaked out. He didn’t deserve to die like that. He was a good man. Firm, but still a decent man. He only wanted the best for me.”
“Hey, it’s a tough situation altogether,” Nelson reasoned. “Your father was a good man. Good sense of humor. Hard worker. He'd want you to fight through this and survive.”
The train rumbled closer. The platform shook, the boards groaning and protesting the vibrations. The train arrived. The doors opened with a hermetic shuffle. Together, Billy and Nelson entered. Billy clutched onto the overhead compartment, while Nelson sat down. The car was empty except for the last eight seats closest to the back. Four men. Four women. They stared at each other from across the car. Backs straight. Eyes unblinking. Faces unreadable.
“What’s with them?” Nelson asked. “Maybe they’re freaked out.”
The doors shut. They were shaken as the train was given a push forward and rolled along the track. Building tops whirred by, the darkness blanketing them to the point they were staring into nothing.
Billy watched the others in the train. The eight didn’t move. Not a facial twitch. Not a cough. “That’s strange.”
“Maybe I should talk to them.”
“No,” Billy insisted. “I don’t need more problems than I already have. It’s situations like this when people go nuts and kill each other. As long as they’re not carrying weapons, we’ve got a head start to run into the next car.”
Billy couldn’t quit looking at them. They were pasty-faced. They looked pure, he thought, untouched by life. No pigment to the skin. Creamy white. The whites of their eyes were bright and unblemished. They even looked alike.
“You keep looking at them,” Nelson whispered. “Why are they so interesting?”
“There's something weird about those people.”
“You got that right. They’re out of some religious colony. They probably don’t know what buildings or civilization are.”
Muffled vibrations nearly sent the train off the track.
BARUMP!
BARUMP!
KATHAM!
They heard the bending of steel, the crashing of windows, screams clashing against screams, the calls of terror, and then the thundering collapse of rafters and concrete and brick. The steady pound of steps overpowered the crash of a nearby building. It was a block or two away. The ruckus wasn’t a single blow, but one of many. Another building was literally uprooted, and Billy and Nelson clutched onto the overhead hold to keep from collapsing onto the floor as the train shook.
The other group didn’t react.
They were glued to the seats, staring at each other.
One of their noses started to bleed. Nelson gasped. “Do you see that?”
Billy was breathing hard without noticing. “Yeah, I see that shit.”
The thud of gigantic steps came closer still. Each of the passengers’ noses started to leak blood. And then red crimson lines descended from their hairlines. As if invisible stitching was undone stitch by stitch, a line down the center of their faces ripped open. Their skulls split, teeth sprouting around the edges of the openings the size of knitting needles, the Venus flytrap head snapping at air. And between snaps, Billy viewed a pair of diamond-colored eyes embedded in their pink brains. The brain was a creature, and somewhere on the brains, a mouth grumbled nonsense and blathered like an insane monster.
The eight shot up from their seats, each with the same flytrap head. The chattering and clamping of teeth continued as they edged toward Billy and Nelson. The overhead lights flickered out. Darkness surrounded them. Their steps closed in.
From the end of the car, the source of the outside devastation presented itself. A bare leg—a human leg—the size of a column at the Lincoln Memorial—swiped the car. The train was hurled from the track and plummeted onto the street.
Chapter Twenty
Ted Fuller was out of breath, having sprinted down the block at full speed. He shut the door to Steven's Auto Body and Salvage behind him and wrapped the chains around the knob. Vickers leaned against the wall catching his breath. He too was out of shape and winded.
The sounds outside continued. Earth shaking and pounding steps: THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD. Telephone poles were uprooted from the street. Buildings tipped over, as if their foundations were rocked hard by seismic waves.
“We have to help those people,” Vickers insisted. “Innocent people everywhere are in danger. My God, what were those vampires doing up there in your apartment?”
“Like I said,” Ted explained, “they’re playing movies on a ghost-inhabited projector. It sounds ludicrous, but it’s the truth. Monsters, ghouls and movie villains are parading around the city. You can’t save anybody until you destroy the projector. It's the only way.”
“There’s no way back up there,” Vickers said. “Those women are dangerous. They’re the ones who killed everybody at Iowa University.”
“Now you’re getting it,” Ted said. “It’s unbelievable, yes, but you saw the women play the movies. If you wander out into the city, you’ll see the monsters they played on the wall wreaking havoc in real life. Don’t ask me how they exist. Ghosts are the source of their power; that's about all I understand as far as an explanation goes. You heard of Andy Ryerson and the Anderson Mills Massacre, right?”
“Yes, I read about it.” Vickers peeked out the window. The way was clear for now. He eyed Ted’s apartment and caught lights flashing. The movies continued to play. “Yeah, Andy Ryerson died at Iowa University. You told me a little bit about Anderson Mills too.”
“Andy was given reels from a Professor Maxwell. He watched those movies in that town, and the town ended up slaughtered. The media, the police, they lived it down. The mystery remains who killed that many people in one night. This is
happening again, Detective. They'll take out the entire city, and I heard those vampire bitches talking. They’ll remove that skull dome and move on to another city and do the same thing again once Chicago's a city of corpses.”
“But why?” Vickers demanded. “What do those women get out of it?”
“They’re ghosts,” Ted reiterated. “They hate the living or they want us to join them. I can’t say for sure. The vampires didn’t spell it out for me. This is supernatural shit. Beyond me.”
“Then I say we burn the place down now. Light it up. Smoke them out of their holes. You said the reels needed to be destroyed, that’ll do it.”
They were set to enact the plan when a sickly sweet smell hit their noses. Like a baking pie and burning flesh and singed hair, was Ted's best guess. A veil of thin smoke obscured the garage.
Ted rubbed his eyes in disbelief at the sight that suddenly formed in front of him. Giant ovens had been incorporated into the walls. A baker’s table the size of a dining room table stood in the center of the room.
The auto garage had vanished and turned into a baker's kitchen, complete with a baker.
Vickers removed a .28 Hawkins pistol from his shoulder holster. “Stay back. It’s one of them.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Ted said. “I’ll stay right here. You take the lead.”
“I need you to distract him for me. Talk him up. Pretend he’s in one of your shitty horror movies, and you’re directing him.”
Ted ignored the insult. “I’ll do my best. I haven't directed in years.”
Vickers slowly moved to the left and snuck into the shadows. That left Ted alone, watching the baker at work. His carrot red hair was snowed in powdered sugar. His apron was spattered with crimson. Eyes alight with a devilish passion, he worked a rolling pin over a wad of flesh and flattened it out with the squish of blood. A naked man, overweight, possibly three-hundred pounds, lay on the table. His stomach had been hollowed out, the mess of guts heaped on the floor.
That can’t be what I think it is.