by Alan Spencer
Now that he wasn’t being shot at, Vic’s thoughts roared to life. I shot a cop. I’m in so much trouble. They’ll give me the death penalty. It was self-defense. They won’t believe me. I’m fucked. I’m so fucked.
Vic stopped thinking when he heard the radio crackle on. An announcer in a monotone drone reported: Fire ants the size of city buses are reported to be eating San Francisco. Checking the authenticity of the claim is our own reporter…
“What the hell is going on?”
He tried the door again. This time it came open. He had to get help, and quick. It would look bad if he fled the scene. He would look guilty.
Vic tried his cell phone. It wouldn’t work. The screen wouldn’t even light up. “Not now, DAMN IT.”
The road was calm. He hoped a car would pass by soon and help him. When Vic thought about it, two cops being dead in a police vehicle, and here he stood a juggernaut who looked like a prime suspect in a double murder, who would help him?
I have to get to the police station.
Before Vic decided to take off running, the trunk of the police car opened by itself. Flies buzzed within, sounding like they were trapped within a tin can. Ten to fifteen bodies were crammed into the trunk space. He thought if someone could pop them out, they would come out in one big hermetic square, they were so compressed. Legs were cracked over heads. Bodies were bent in half. Arms were bent against the points of flexion. Each of them had been shot execution style through the back of the head. They were normal people. Citizens.
“They’re witnesses,” a garbled voice raged. “They know too much. They’re putting us out of a job. One day they won’t need us. They’ve already let go of us so many of us. Not me. I was born a cop, and I’ll die a cop.”
It was the cop from the driver’s seat. He bled from four wounds in the abdomen. He stood up without pain. His blackjack club was clutched, ready to dash over Vic’s head. “You know too much, citizen. You’re not under arrest. You have no rights.” The cop’s eyes doubled. “Get on your knees, boy. You have the right to remain silent forever.”
Vic had left the pistol in the patrol car.
Shit.
The cop made his first advance. Where could he run? The blackjack was raised over his head. Vic thought of the plumber about to level the plunger into Sam’s face. Another half-step, the bend of the cop’s arm, and he would be walloped. Vic cocked his fist and pivoted his foot back to really deliver a powerful blow. His knuckles rocked the cop’s face. The flesh and bone bludgeon caught the man between the ear and jaw. The cop’s feet left the ground. He was hurled backward several feet.
Vic took his one chance to escape and broke out into a sprint. Running down the highway, he couldn’t say how long he fled before a set of flashing red lights appeared behind him and a real cop read him his Miranda rights.
Chapter Eleven
Vic was booked at police headquarters. He undergone having his thumbprints taken and posed for a mug shot. The two cops who arrested him delivered Vic down a hallway and into an interrogation room. Vic remained in handcuffs. He sat at a table whose surface was marked and gouged as if someone had taken a dull knife to it. The room smelled of stale coffee and cigarettes. The classic double sided mirror was on one wall. The officers asked him to sit and wait. A Detective Pemberton would soon arrive to question him.
A minute later, the detective entered the room. Pemberton was a lead investigator of violent crimes. He had course gray stubble for a beard, with a short buzz cut that gleamed the color of a nickel. Pemberton had rolled up the sleeves of his buttoned up shirt, revealing arms muscular by the work of push-ups.
“You Victor Greaves?”
Vic nodded, that yes, that was who he was. The motion wasn’t good enough.
“I said, are you Victor Greaves? I talk in words. How about you, son? You going to talk to me, or is this a one man show? If it’s all me, you won’t be very entertained. You’ll be coughing up your teeth and pissing blood by the intermission. You got me, pal?”
Vic could’ve said a thousand smart ass comments in response, but the number of people he had seen killed so viciously humbled him. He would do anything to fix this horrible situation and correct this misunderstanding.
“Yes, my name is Victor Greaves. Sorry, sir.”
Pemberton was standing near the double plated glass. He had his arms crossed and studied Vic like every word Vic had said was new to the English language. “You think being nice to me is going to win me over? Don’t patronize me. I’ve got the goods on you, Greaves.” The man’s sneer could cut through steel. “Look at you. You’re covered in different colors of blood. Murder’s written all over you.”
Vic did his best to keep the calm in his voice and his trademark temper in check. “It looks bad, I agree, sir, but it’s not the way it happened. I’m innocent. It’s a terrible set of circumstances.”
“Killing your family and your ex-wife’s lover is one thing. But you also killed a cop who happened to be a good friend of mine. Worse, you stuff him into a body bag and ride around town. I think calling it ‘a terrible set of circumstances’ might be downplaying it a bit. What do you think, Greaves?”
Pemberton blew the lid off of his pressure cooker. He lifted Vic up out of his chair and shoved him into the wall. Pemberton had Vic by the neck. He bashed the back of Vic’s head into the wall once, giving a “Yeaaaaaaah!” and then punched Vic full-on in the gut three times.
Vic was a pile on the floor, coughing up his lungs. It felt like clothespins were embedded in his entire midsection. He shielded his head, fearing more of a beating. The violent show seemed to pacify Pemberton’s rage. The detective went back to the wall at exactly the same spot he was leaning against earlier. He struck a match and lit a cigar. Pemberton moaned during the first toke. Then it was right back to business.
“It’s an open and shut case, Greaves. I’ve got your bloody prints all over that police car. We got your prints all over your ex-wife’s house. Looks like you spent some time in prison once upon a time for aggravated assault. I’ve got witnesses who saw you running from that police vehicle covered in blood. It all adds up in my head. So I have to ask you a question. How did you remove Sam Unger’s face like that? It’s such a clean removal. Even the crime scene techs are baffled. I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re as sick as you are crafty. Impressive. In a sick fucked up kind of way.”
Vic didn’t want to get his ass kicked again, but he couldn’t listen to these false allegations a second longer. “Detective, I can say I didn’t do it all day long, and it wouldn’t make a difference one way or another. I want to talk to a lawyer.”
“The guilty ones always do. Yep. They lawyer-up almost right off the bat.” The detective muttered contrition under his breath. “The thing about psychotics I don’t get, Greaves, is that to commit such heinous killing as you have, you have to be bat-shit crazy, right? But once the blood is shed, the psychos get smart. They want lawyers. They play the system. They suddenly become Rhodes Scholars after the bodies start growing cold. I never figured that one out about sadistic killers like you, Greaves. It just baffles me.”
Vic didn’t have a comment, so Pemberton kept unloading the burdens in his head. “I looked you up, Vic. You’re a low rent guy. Security jobs mostly. I also read how your father used to be homicide detective. Your dad brought his job home with him, didn’t he? He saw blood and guts and evil people and couldn’t drink it off. Some can’t. So daddy took it out on you, right, Greaves? You’ve got some pent-up shit in you too, huh? It’s why you went off on your ex-wife’s lover when you caught her cheating on you. Yeah, your father beat you, didn’t he? He beat you like he wanted to beat all those murderers out there. That’s why you killed your family. What you did to your daughters is heinous. My God, Greaves, they were in pieces.”
Vic had tears steaming down his face. His father did beat him. Vic did have an anger problem. But he did
n’t kill anybody. Especially his daughters. He would never lay a hand on them. Ever. It didn’t change the fact they were dead.
Pemberton eyed Vic’s tears, checking to see if his emotions were genuine or not. The detective smoked his cigar, enjoyed the moment and then he stepped out. Under his breath, Pemberton said, “You’re a gas, Greaves. Enjoy the electric chair.”
Chapter Twelve
Vic was escorted to a closed-off cell. It was a room with a steel door. A metal cot nailed into the wall. He imagined these were the kind of beds sanitariums used. It smelled of Lysol, day old sweat and recently dried paint. The cinder block walls were a puke green color. Everything in the room was depressing. He craved a hot shower, a bar of soap, and most of all, a change out of his bloodied clothes.
Vic lapped water in the sink, being dry mouthed. Then he lay on the cot to collect his thoughts. Hours or only minutes might’ve passed when he was startled from his deep sleep, waking in a fog. He rubbed his eyes to clear the cottony blotches to see who was talking to him in the cell. Vic missed the beginning of what he was saying. And when had the guy entered the room?
What struck Vic first was the fact the man was wearing black sunglasses. He was dressed in an army coat and white washed jeans. He had a mullet haircut and under the coat was an old school Budweiser T-shirt. He sat on the floor across from the cot and talked to Vic like nothing was out of the ordinary.
Vic realized he had slept through the man’s arrival. Had to have. But there wasn’t another cot in the room. Did the police expect them to bunk together? Whatever, he thought.
The stranger kept talking. “Women give me the hardest time. I guess I’m not the prettiest catch on this earth.” He counted items off of his fingers. “But come on, I’m nice, I’m polite, I buy the ladies drinks and I always wear a condom. That’s a winner if you ask me. The babes got it out for me, man. God doesn’t want me to get laid.”
“I hear you,” Vic said just to talk. “Very true.”
The stranger’s voice turned mean. “God has got it out for all men. We’re nothing but horny dogs. Sleazebags. I admit I’m a sleazebag. All men are sleazebags. So fear God, is what I’m telling you. He’s teaching us a lesson for giving women so much trouble.”
Vic suddenly felt uncomfortable. “Wait, what are you talking about?”
It was as if Vic hadn’t spoken, the way the guy carried on. “I met a girl the other night. Nice tits. Tits that could make a man howl at the moon. Tits a man dreams of coming home to after a long hard day. Tits better than a cold one. This girl, she was a blonde. A real honey hole. She could make a man sin. She’s in the parking lot outside this strip club. She’s got on a pair of cut-off jean shorts and an undershirt that’s pressing so hard against those tits, I could see them, the buds and everything, but it’s not the same as seeing them without clothing. She’s got to be naked. She’s teasing me, pretending to take off her shirt. She has me going. I’ve got a hard on the size of Texas. Her tits have got me in a trance, and when she hiked up that shirt and showed me those titties,” the man shrieked at the top of his lungs, throwing off the glasses, “the light coming off of them was so hot it made me gouge my eyes out with my own two hands! Oh, the paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain!”
Vic yelped seeing the man’s gummed up holes for eyes. Shreds of meat and tissue hung from the hollows in strings. The man had his grip on Vic’s arms, shouting in his face: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
In a blink, the man vanished.
Suffering a heavy dose of shock, Vic kept pealing the walls with his terror until his throat could give no more. His arms were bent in front of him as if he were still fending off the eyeless man. Vic bolted off of the cot and banged his body against the cell door, demanding to be released. Nobody answered his summons for another hour. By then, Vic knew he was in trouble. The gunfire and sounds of panic that had erupted throughout the building had finally died down into silence.
The door to his cell clicked and opened.
Chapter Thirteen
Detective Pemberton had opened the cell door and had fallen to his knees after doing so. Five bullets holes oozed blood from his torso. Vic could see the detective’s heart in tatters between the broken pieces of his sternum. How was the man still alive? Pemberton was paint white. Bloodless. He remained slumped on the ground. Before he gave himself over to death, the detective offered Vic a 12 gauge and a set of keys.
“…out the back way. It’s not safe anywhere. It’s beginning. The dead may have their wishes after all. Everyone will be dead. God help you, Greaves. God help everyone.”
The man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head.
Pemberton was dead.
Vic clutched the 12 gauge and stuffed the keys into his pants pocket. He edged down the hall towards the way he’d come after being processed earlier. A hand grabbed his ankle. It was Pemberton.
“Hey, don’t go that way. It’s not safe. Take the back way. The dead will show you the way outside.”
Before Pemberton could say more, his face boiled and fizzed into pink sludge. His entire body was boiling, the skin sloughing off the bones and pooling on the floor in an ugly gruel.
Wasn’t he dead? How could he talk?
And did he just melt?
Vic had to be losing his mind. He moved on, searching the place out for another living person. Anybody to fact check what he witnessed. It was the only way to proceed, so he stalked the hall. He passed cell door after cell door hearing strange screams and emanations. Alarmed, Vic peered into one of the glass windows and would quickly regret it. A man in an orange prison jump suit was spinning, rolling and dodging something invisible. The room’s shadows were moving about as if they were a living thing. The prisoner saw Vic and warned him, “Don’t let the shadows eat you. They crave human flesh!”
When he said that, the top half of the prisoner was covered in shadows. When the shadows pulled back, the man was only a pair of feet up to the kneecaps. The rest of him was gone.
Vic backed up after witnessing the unreal spectacle. It sounded like air grumbling through old pipes, and then from the crack of the door, black shadows spilled forth like oil. The oil then turned back into shadow, draping half the hallway in darkness. Sections of the shadows crawled into the cells only for calls of horror to abruptly follow.
The shadows were coming for Vic next.
Darting forward with newfound agility, Vic passed through a door, crossed another hallway full of detective offices occupied by dead corpses laying on the ground and bleeding from what looked like gunshot wounds. Vic moved even faster. On the walls, bloody words were finger painted. The same two words over and over again. JOB SECURITY. JOB SECURITY. JOB SECURITY. JOB SECURITY.
Vic realized he was lost, standing in a section of more offices and conference rooms. There was no exit. No obvious way out. He could hear the grumbling pipes roar. The shadows were drawing near.
A gun blast THOOMED. The chunk of wall above Vic’s head exploded in a powdery cave-in. Down the hall the overweight officer he recognized from earlier today clutched a magnum pistol in one hand and a woman’s severed head in the other.
“This head belongs to your local congresswoman,” the cop announced. “Citizen, I want you to watch what happens to the people who cross the police. Who fuck them over! You can thank her for laying off half the Detroit police force.”
Detroit? We’re in West Virginia.
The cop jammed his pistol in the dead woman’s mouth. The next moment, the head went up into apple chunk sized pieces. “Bet you wish you had me now to protect you, stupid bitch!”
The officer cheered, his hand clutching a tuft of curly hair and a mandible. Leftovers of the head. He dropped the mess and eyed Vic with those bulbous mean eyes. The sight of blood, death and gun smoke gave the wicked cop a charge. Before he could fire again, Vic ducked into the nearest room. He threw the heavy wood door closed and locked
it. When he turned around and faced the large conference room, he was no safer in here than out there.
Splayed on top of the long table that took up most of the narrow room were pieces from over twenty bodies. They were all police officers, detectives and criminals. Hacked up limbs, torsos and piles of guts were heaped tall. Blood oozed off the table’s edge constantly, the trickle raising the hairs on the nape of Vic’s neck. The room was in darkness except for the white square projected onto the wall. The Orion projector was playing a reel against the wall. The image displayed dead people stalking outside a house and smashing through windows and battering down doors to reach a woman who screamed in her living room. It was a zombie flick.
Vic tightened his grip on the 12 gauge. The whole time he had it in his hands! He forgot about it. Every inch of him shivered. He breathed in the noxious smell of offal mess on the table, but there was another smell intermingled with the mess. Rotting flesh. Necrotic tissue. Spoiled meat. And stranger yet, dirt.
He was backed up to the wall taking in what occupied the twelve chairs around the conference table. The chairs were facing the projected images, as if they were watching the movie. Their backs were to him at first, before they slowly swiveled in their chairs to stare back at him. Bone fingers reached into the piles of death on the table and took nibbles of eyeballs and soft hunks of skin and expiring organs. The collective chomping of twelve mouths at once wrought such discord in Vic that he almost vomited right then. Corpses in funeral attire faced him, each of their expressions solid as rock.
They were living death.
Zombies.
Vic stepped over the extension cord that belonged to the projector. He would’ve tripped over it if it wasn’t held down by duct tape onto the carpet. Before he could register the living corpses, the door was shot up with holes as if an entire firing squad had taken fire to it.