by Alan Spencer
Reece got down onto his haunches with twin cricks of his knees. "Did you hear my knees? The old mare ain't what she used to be. Take this, Dominic. You deserve a drink."
He saw the filled shot glass. He threw it back, swallowed it, and everything seemed to get easier from then on.
"Good man. Does a body good." Reece patted him on the back. "You'll be okay. You didn't poop yourself. You can live down jumping or screaming, but having a poop-a-lanche in your drawers isn't so forgivable. Look, the party's already resumed as normal. Everybody's playing with the Sheckler dummy now."
Reece was right. Nobody cared about Dominic almost dying of fright.
Trudy held him close and smiled. "You going to be okay?"
"Yeah. I thought the man was dead. I really believed it."
"Sheckler's up to his old tricks again," Reece said. "Come on. Let me show you the next room. The alcohol is settling in your veins. You're good as new."
Reece led them on. Inside was a cleared out guest bedroom. What stood in the middle was like a revolving door entrance into one of those skyscrapers. The glass was spray-painted silver to give it a metallic appearance. Garden hoses painted black and glowing buttons covered the standing cylinder. Tables were set up topped with Bunsen burners, boiling green and blue beakers, and lab microscopes made out of cardboard.
"This is from Degenerate Machine," Dominic said. "Check out Dr. Gourmand's lab."
Reece laughed. "It was cheap then, and it's glorious now. I raised about twenty-five grand for the film. I still worked for a marketing firm full-time. I was scrimping and begging, while Sheckler wrote his script. He promised me the drive-in circuit would eat this stuff up. He was right. The audience did. I remember when Degenerate Machine came out, we played it in one theatre, and some old guy had a heart attack. What a stroke of luck.
"The papers failed to note the heart attack happened when the fat fuck was leaving the concession stand with two tubs of buttered popcorn. It had nothing to do with the movie. The headlines gave the movie some serious hype. We made back our money times five. It was smooth sailing until the late seventies when home video put us out of business. Those were the best years of my life."
The odd machine hissed, issuing dry ice smoke. The revolving door turned, and in one door, a man in a leather BDSM outfit and leather mask clutched an axe and waved it at them. The villain had to push the door forward, just like in the original movie, to get it to turn, so the next villain could be revealed.
A woman with plastic medusa snakes coming out of her head with bared breasts, a thong, and a giant chainsaw in her hands laughed in that special sinister way, and seconds later, she too pushed the revolving door forward and revealed yet another character.
They kept coming.
A cyborg with one arm bared to steel to show off a wicked claw. A blue man with horns coming out his head and an evil mouth painted on his chest. A butcher carrying a meat grinder with intestines dangling from the end did a jig and kept saying how hungry him and his friends were, and how they were next on the menu.
"I can't wait to see what comes next!" Trudy said.
Reece had a big smile on his face.
Dominic gave Trudy a high five. "This is so awesome."
The next window opened. Fog was spilling out of the machine like crazy. A woman with big blonde '80's hair, blue eye shadow, bright red lipstick, and giant hoop earrings bounded out of the door. She wore a leather jacket over a pink dress. In her clutches was a sizeable kitchen knife.
"Tonight's the night you die!"
The mad woman rushed out of the machine, startling them all. She jammed the blade into Reece's rib cage. The man gave a choked gargle of pain as blood mushroomed from his lips. His side was dripping red in increasing torrents. Once he fell backwards and struck the floor, the man didn't make a sound, because he was ice cold dead.
The mad woman dressed like a teenage rocker from the '80's dug out another knife from the inside of her leather jacket. Her eyes were maliciously bent. She licked her lips and kept saying, "Blood. Blood. Blood" as she crept closer to them.
"The door. Quick!"
Dominic urged Trudy towards the door.
They tried the knob.
It was locked.
"I'm going to kick it down."
Trudy grabbed him. "No time. She's too close."
The woman was closing in on them. She was sneering, growling, and clutching the knife to plunge into both of their bodies. The woman was very angry, the way she breathed and eyed them both.
"Stay back. Why did you kill Reece? Who are you?"
The woman didn't answer. She only rasped, "Blood. Blood. Blood."
"If this is one of Sheckler's jokes, I'll pay you money to stop."
The woman didn't hesitate. Bloodlust throbbed in her eyes.
"I mean it. I will stop you if I have to. I know this is a joke. It has to be. For God's sake listen to me!"
He eyed Reece's corpse. His eyes were wide open, unflinching. Blood kept seeping from his shirt and from the side of his mouth. The man was clearly a murder victim.
"Last chance, lady. Back off, or I'll make you back off."
"Blood. Blood. Blood."
Trudy clutched onto him. "What are you going to do?"
"Only if she makes me," he kept saying. "Only if she makes me."
The woman positioned her body to pounce on them. The knives were raised over her head. "Bah-loooooooooood!"
Everything happened so fast, when it was all over, he didn't know who was screaming.
Dominic emptied the pepper spray into the woman's face. She dropped her knife and retreated backwards with a screech. She used her outstretched hands to feel where she was going. The woman snuck back into the revolving doorway and disappeared.
"That woman wasn't playing around," Dominic managed to spit out, making sure Trudy wasn't hurt. "She's a real psycho."
"Maybe it was a crazy fan who snuck into the party?"
"If that's the case, we need to warn everybody else. Who knows what else is going on?"
He kept trying the door. It remained locked. He was about to try and kick it down when he noticed something strange. The door wasn't quite right. He knocked on it. The door was solid steel. He wouldn't be able to kick it down.
Dominic and Trudy banged on the door and called out to anyone for help. From outside, the party music from the speakers blared extra loud. Someone had turned up the volume recently. Nobody was going to hear them.
"This better not be one of Sheckler's jokes," Trudy snapped.
"It's not. Reece is dead. That woman killed her. I think there's only one way out of this room."
"Where?"
"Through the degenerate machine. Obviously that machine is connected to another room. How else would the effect work?"
"But that's where that woman is. She's probably waiting for us to make a move."
"Now's the time. She's got a world of pain in her eyes. Thank my brother for giving me that pepper spray." He dug into his pocket and showed her the closed butterfly knife. "And this."
"You're not going to stab her, are you?"
"Let's hope we don't have to. Try your phone again."
She dialed. "No signal. Nothing."
"Sounds like we don't have a choice."
They didn't have to talk about it any longer.
Together, they approached the degenerate machine.
Catering this party wasn't supposed to be so damn stressful, Chuck Winder thought. The items were easy to prepare and serve. Sheckler ordered finger foods. Chicken fingers. Ribs. Buffalo wings. Shrimp. Fries. Onion rings. Popcorn. A chocolate fountain dyed blood red. The challenge existed in the presentation; namely, the gross stuff.
Displaying the food on fake dummy corpses who looked like massacre victims was a chore in itself. Then there was the sheer mass of people that were devouring the food. Chuck had a meager staff of six. The party was to be described as intimate. Fifty people, max. This soiree was more like one hundred and cha
nge. They were all weirdoes, and drunk weirdoes. The kitchen was now a sweat shop.
The head chef and owner of Winder Catering Services knew his workers were going to rebel against him. It didn't help Chuck started this catering company only three months ago. He was suffering through a lot of growing pains. He couldn't wait for the evening to be over.
The people who entered the room were going to take his problems to a whole new insane level. Chuck didn't see them originally enter the kitchen area. He was tending to a row of grease vats when four people appeared. One man, one woman, and two young boys (adults dressed to look like children, adorned in their Sunday's best) were studying over the kitchen. They were dead ringers for the family in Leave it to Beaver. Nice proper clothes from the fifties. Wholesome looking. The difference was the dark bags under their eyes, their purple drab lips, and skin the color of frog's belly. Instead of the Cleaver family, they were literally the "meat cleaver" family by the giant oversized meat cleavers clutched in their hands. It strained the persons to carry them, they were so hulking huge. He had never seen such big blades before.
The mother wore a house dress and a big pearl necklace.
She eyed Chuck with keen interest
"Christmas is coming up soon. We could pickle the chef's nuts or save his teeth to make jewelry. The kids can use his head for a soccer ball if we dry it right after severing it. We certainly can't let the maggots get to it. If we do that, we might as well feed it to the dog. Brownie is spoiled enough as it is. We let him eat our neighbors last week. He's still gnawing on their bones in the backyard."
The father figure, in a gray suit, ran his finger down the sharp edge of his cleaver. "I say let the kids decide what to do with his body. They've been good little boys. Give them a treat. Children have to be rewarded for good behavior."
Smoke was pouring out from one of the ovens. The woman raced over to the appliance and opened it. "Oh, they're going to burn!"
Inside was Chuck's staff in dismembered pieces. They were burned near charcoal black.
"Feed them to the dog," the father said with flagrant disgust. "So much for dinner."
The child pointed his cleaver at Chuck. "I want to eat him, Mommy. Can we? Huh? Can we? Can we? Can we?"
Chuck gasped. "What's wrong with you people? You're killers. I'm calling the cops."
The family didn't hear him.
"Yeah, Mommy. Can we eat him? Pl-eease. My tummy is growling."
One kid dropped his cleaver and grabbed a ketchup bottle from the counter. The other child picked mustard.
"I'm so hungry, Mommy."
"Please, Mommy, please."
"Dinner is ruined," the mother said in exasperation, eyeing the cleaver with new intent. "We worked so hard to make that meal work."
"No need to go hungry when there's plenty of meat right in front of us," the father laughed jovially. "I say we chow down."
"Can we eat him raw, Mommy? Huh, Mommy? Nice, and raw, and bloody?"
"Yeah. Raw. Mommy. Please. Raw. Bloody."
Mother and father gave each other that "kids will be kids" expressions and threw their heads back in delight.
"Oh, okay. We can eat him raw. Eat whatever piece you want. I get to keep his nuts, though. Christmas is coming up, and gifts are expensive."
Chuck was wailing in terror during the family's exchange.. His horror hit new peaks when four cleavers swung down on him at once.
They turned the degenerate machine's revolving door forward and entered. Inside of it was where the characters earlier were waiting for their chance to scare the hell out of people. This hiding area was the size of a small bathroom. Dominic and Trudy gasped at the blood. The hired actors were in pieces. Axed crudely, there wasn't a single person recognizable under the sheets of blood. Faces were X'd out by axe marks.
Dominic tried not to get sick. "This answers the question officially."
"What question?"
"This isn't a party anymore. We're all in serious danger." He pointed at the door ahead of them. "Sheckler must've done some serious reconfiguration of the mansion. He built a new door in the wall over there. I wonder where it leads."
"I'm afraid to know. That woman used it, because there's no other way to go. Why can't we wait here?"
"You want to keep staring at these hacked up bodies, because I don't. Others are in danger too. Who knows if she's the only psycho Sheckler groupie in the house? She could be anybody. Morbid fan. Killer. Psycho. Whatever. We still don't know her reason for being here."
"She can't be working alone."
"Maybe it's that guy Sheckler introduced us to...what's his name?"
"Graham Jenkins. Yeah. Of course. Maybe. Then again, if Graham's behind all of this, he needed help too."
"What if Sheckler's doing this? He already lied to us about being sick. He tricked his guests into coming here."
"The possibilities are endless. Putrid Peter could be added to the list. He hated the guy before coming here. But I know he lit up like a Christmas tree when Sheckler finally paid his debts to him. Stan Barton's another guy, but he's gone now. One of Sheckler's exes could be behind this, or all of them. Jesus. Anybody who worked with Sheckler could be upset enough to do something like this. He ripped off a lot of people in his day. He's got a ton of detractors. Every angle of this is bad."
"Shhh. You hear that? My God."
Dominic listened. Trudy clutched his arm tighter and tighter.
The blaring music was cut to silence.
What they heard next chilled them to the very marrow of their souls.
Slab sat in the back of Sheckler's horror limo and enjoyed a coke. He never drank alcohol on duty. He never knew when the guests he escorted would be done with the party. The affair could go well into the next morning. It could be thirty minutes from now when the guests were pooped out, or six hours from now. He was watching one of Sheckler's films on the TV screen in the back seats to pass the time.
Thirty Minutes--Or It's Your Head! was playing. A pizza deliverer possessed by a serial killer shot down at Tony's Greasy Pizza Parlor was going around town delivering pizzas...and death. Sheckler had included a notebook giving movie descriptions of the films showing in the limo because he asked for it. Slab knew little about the horror director's film cannon and was intrigued by it.
Slab was getting into the movie, mostly because of the nudity. Slab couldn't count how many women answered the door topless or with skin tights clothes and no bra. The plot mostly involved the delivery man showing pizza boxes with gory pieces of people inside them and then chasing the would-be customer with various weaponry. Add a couple of dumbass detectives hot on the trail of the pizza slaughterer, and presto, movie.
There was a knock on the side of the car.
I'm on.
Looks like the party poopers are ready to go home.
Man, and the movie was just getting good. Look at the set of knockers on that bitch. Wowee wow wow.
Slab got up ready to perform his job. Sheckler was paying him a solid five hundred dollars for one night. He couldn't beat that.
He searched for the passengers around the vehicle. There wasn't anybody around, except for the woman who stood in front of the mansion. She was buck naked. She had wild red hair flowing down to her chest. The same fiery triangle of hair downstairs. Her body was smooth, and pale, and had those awesome curves. Just like the movie he had just watched before the pizza one called The Birthday Suit Murders.
The villain had special powers. When she was naked, everybody stared at her body and was temporarily mesmerized and frozen in place. She goes from stealing food, eating at high end restaurants, to robbing banks, and eventually to murder...and as long as she was naked, she got away with it. Odd plot. Bizarre movie. He couldn't take his eyes of it, just like he couldn't peel his gaze from the real lady in front of him.
The naked woman was a dead ringer from the main character in the movie. The red hair matched. Her nakedness matched. Then he realized this was a Sheckler party.
"Very funny, lady. Oh, okay. I'll play along." Slab put out his hands like a zombie. "I'm in a trance. Your titties. Your bush. I'm a helpless, helpless fool. Do as you will."
He saw it from the corner of his eyes. Why he didn't see it earlier disturbed him. Another limonene's hood was open. A driver's head was cooking on the hot engine block. Yet another hood was up, and intestines were sizzling and popping like greasy bacon.
Before he could say a single word, the naked woman raised a detonator in her hand. She pressed the giant red button on the black box. From under each car, an explosive was activated. Huge balls of fire chewed up steel. The limousines were crunched up by orange angry fists of flames. The fiery rage turned Slab into a high flying burning piece of meat that was dead before hitting the ground.
"Look pal, I delivered on time. You pay up. Greasy Tony takes it out of my pay if I come back with unsold pizzas. These pizzas are primo. Look, see for yourself. Premium gore-gon-zola, Colby hack, Suisse Morty, and very very sharp Teddy cheese. The sauce is better than anything your mother can make. I'm sure she was included in this batch. We don't just use tomatoes, ya know."
Stan Barton was boiling with fury moments ago. Now he was truly frightened by what stood in front of him. The man was dressed in a tight red polo shirt stained in grease. His netted baseball hat read: Greasy Tony's Pizza Parlor. The guy had a pimply face, though Stan could've swore those pimples were make-up effects.
He would've called bullshit on the guy if it weren't for the pizza guy flashing what was in his boxes. Pizzas topped with noses, eyeballs, and tongues were twisted up in the cheese. It really smelled like a pizza was cooked with dead body parts. The reek tested his gorge. The fear compelled him to keep it down.
The guy's feet were covered in blood.
Not the sticky theatrical kind.
Real blood.
The pizza guy held up a circular pizza cutter. "If you don't pay, we have to get our money back somehow. I guess we'll throw you in the sauce batch to cut our losses. Come here. Let me get a piece of you. You pick where I take the skin. I'll be nice. That's more than fair, pal. I don't always offer that."