Salazar smiled. “Do you still have that knack for animating inanimate objects?’
“Yeah, sure,” Griswold said. “Haven’t used it in a while, so I might be a little rusty, but I’m sure it’ll come back to me.”
“Great,” Salazar said, clapping his hands. “Think you could work your magic on a dead body?”
“What?” Griswold grumbled, looking genuinely peeved for a moment. “You serious here? That’s, like, the easiest self-locomotion spell you can do. Any idiot can animate something that’s already got all the guts and muscles and stuff ready for you. That’s almost insulting.” He leaved his fingers together and stretched his hands out, loudly popping the joints. “Now animatin’ a statue or something, makin’ solid stone move and talk and act like it’s alive, that takes finesse …”
“Just the body will be fine for now,” Salazar said, reaching up to pat Griswold on the shoulder again. “Think you can stop by my office after the shoot?”
“Yeah, sure,” Griswold grumbled, turning to lumber back to the craft services table. “But you better come through with that Tempest gig.”
By the time Salazar got back to his office, Andi was already there waiting for him, sitting in the same plush armchair across from his desk, staring at nothing in particular with a haunted, dead-eyed expression. Her face was pale and gaunt, and her hands were stained crimson as she clutched her backpack protectively on top of her lap. The same shade of red speckled and splotched her clothing practically from head to toe, and after a couple seconds’ examination, Salazar realized that a dark, wet stain covered the entire bottom of her backpack.
“Um … do I even want to know what’s in there?” he said, gesturing idly towards the bag in her lap.
“No,” she said quietly, without looking up at him. “No, you really don’t.”
“Fine,” Salazar muttered, shuffling over to his desk and slumping back down in the chair. “Anyway, you’re good to go. I’ve set you up with someone who can bring that thing to life.”
“Wait,” Andi said. “Really?” Without thinking, she stumbled to her feet, and her backpack landed on the floor with a subdued squish. Salazar winced. This carpet was a pain in the ass to clean. “Oh my gosh, thank you so much—”
“Hey,” Salazar said, holding up a finger to silence her. “Just ’cause I don’t want your soul doesn’t mean I’m doing this for free, per se. Are you still in contact with that famous uncle of yours?”
Andi swallowed. “Y-yeah …?”
“You tell him to get his ass into my office before the end of the week,” Salazar said, lowering his hand onto his desk. “We’ve got business—like, actual, above-board Hollywood business—that he’s been putting off for way too long.”
Andi’s expression brightened again. “Oh, okay!” she said cheerfully. “Is that all?”
“Yeah,” Salazar muttered, leaning back in his chair. “Now you should go finish up whatever else you need to do on your monster. His body needs to be whole and complete before my buddy comes and works his magic.”
“Oh, yeah, of course!” Andi said, grabbing her backpack up off the floor. She turned and marched toward the door, but stopped just before leaving and hesitantly glanced back over her shoulder. “Uh … Salazar?”
“Yeah?”
“When I was out collecting the last set of, um … parts, the ones I was taking from living people, tracking down the ones I needed like I was some kind of … big game hunter or something …” Her gaze lost focus for a second, like her mind was drifting elsewhere, then she forced herself to snap back. “I, um … I kind of enjoyed it.” She gulped. “Is, um … is that a bad thing?”
Salazar shrugged. “Only if you think actors count as human beings,” he said. “I’ve been working in this business for over a century, and as far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out.”
“Oh,” Andi said, trembling a little. “Well, um, okay. I guess I’ll just—” Her phone started ringing, and she quickly fumbled it out of her pocket with her less-bloody hand and glanced at the screen. “Oh, crap,” she said. “It’s Gene Cullen’s lawyer. I should probably take this …” And without another word, she scurried out the door and let it close behind her.
Salazar just sat at his desk, slowly shaking his head for a couple seconds, then let out a long sigh and pulled the next script off of his “To Do” pile. He still had another hour and a half before he could quit for the day. This particular masterpiece of cinema was titled Lesbian Werewolves on Campus Part II: That Time of the Month Again! Lovely.
Salazar was halfway through reading the third draft of Swamp Beast in Cleveland when the door to his office creaked open again and Andi poked her head in with a beaming grin. As usual, Salazar would take any excuse to put his script down for a second, even if this one was surprisingly not terrible.
“Yes?” he said.
Without saying a word, Andi pushed the door open the rest of the way to reveal the tall, newly-animated figure standing behind her. And to Salazar’s shock, Andi’s creation actually looked … good. Griswold’s life-giving spell had fused the flesh together and evened out the skin tone, making the scars and stitching holding the creature together almost invisible. And the whole idea of taking a bunch of features that were individually handsome a la carte and fusing them together had actually kind of worked. Gene Cullen’s pale blue eyes gazed out at them from under Alan Fineworth’s long, golden mullet and overtop of Jack Grayson’s perfectly cleft chin. The rest of the face seemed to be taken from that teen heartthrob kid, Tundifer McCloud, and however Andi had patched the rest of the body together, he now looked like a realistically buff California beach hunk.
Salazar immediately got to his feet. “Well?” he said expectantly. “Has he met your uncle yet?”
“Yes!” Andi squealed. “And Uncle Robert said he was perfect! I told him this was ‘Jerry Cruz,’ a friend of my cousin, and that he just got off the bus from Oklahoma—”
“Oh … kla … ho … ma …” the creature droned out.
“Right, Jerry. And Uncle Robert signed him for the part immediately, without even auditioning him!”
“Congratulations!” Salazar said. “What part does Mr. Springfield want this guy to play, anyway?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Andi said, glancing back up at the creature, beaming. “He’s casting Jerry to play Jesus!”
Salazar started laughing so hard it didn’t even register when Andi said she had to get Jerry back on set and led the creature out the door. At first, Salazar was supporting all his weight on his desk, until he finally rolled onto the floor and lay on the carpet for a while gasping for breath in between bouts of giddy giggling. He wasn’t sure how long he had been on the floor by the time the laughter finally ceased, but a bolt of realization flashed across his mind, and he scrambled back to his feet.
“Hey, wait!” he shouted at the empty room. “Don’t forget your side of the bargain! Tell your asshole of an uncle that he still owes me money!”
Andi hunched down next to her idling pickup truck as she rolled the dead body into the muddy ditch at the side of the road. It was pouring rain in the dead of night, but even that had not been able to wash the red stains off of her jacket. The tears streaming down her face mingled with the raindrops splattering her from above. It had all started with that damned monster she created; that’s what had given her the taste for it.
It had seemed so innocent back then—well … relatively speaking, at least. Back then, she hadn’t been killing people just for the thrill of killing them, she was collecting raw materials for a Very Important Project, something that would help her uncle’s career.
Except … she had liked it. Not just liked it … she had begun to crave it, that brief hit of absolute euphoria she felt every time a human being’s life drained out between her fingers, like nothing she ever felt, better than sex, better than God, followed almost immediately by the growing urge to do it again. After she had finished the monster, she had made it almost a month befo
re killing someone again, just for fun this time. Then two weeks after that. Then only one week.
Now, she could barely make it two days.
Her heart was already pounding in her chest, but she felt it lurch into double-time when she saw headlights suddenly appear in the distance. Another car was coming. Breathe, she told herself. This back road was pretty far out of the way, but it was by no means abandoned. It could easily be just some schlub from the suburbs coming out for a late-night beer run. They had no reason to suspect she was out here disposing of a body, or doing anything else sinister. Hell, the driver probably couldn’t even see the body from their vantage point as they passed by the truck—
The car slowed down as it drew closer and closer, until it finally pulled to a complete stop parallel to her truck. Andi told her legs to move, to just run off down the road like a madwoman and disappear into the rain, but her muscles wouldn’t obey. The door swung open, finally revealing the mystery driver. It was Salazar.
“Get in,” he grunted at her. She quietly obeyed.
“H-h-how did you know I was here?” she stammered, as soon as the passenger’s-side door was closed behind her. Salazar just rolled his eyes as the car started back down the road.
“Please,” he muttered. “Your little late-night excursions are the worst-kept secret in Hollywood. If your uncle wasn’t rich, you’d be in prison a dozen times over by now.”
Andi only barely heard what he was saying as she watched her truck—and the body—disappear in the rearview mirror.
“But that’s not what I’m here about,” Salazar continued, keeping his eyes locked on the road ahead of him to avoid making eye contact with her. “Your little science fair project worked too well.”
Andi gulped, then glanced over at him. “He … he what?”
“You never gave your monster a personality or identity,” Salazar said, “so whenever a director gives him a role, he literally thinks he is the character.”
“Dear God,” Andi whispered. “I’ve created a … a …”
“A method actor,” Salazar grumbled. “Which would be bad enough on its own, but do you happen to remember the first role your bouncing baby freak was assigned to?”
Andi thought for a second, and then her eyes went wide.
“He thinks he’s actually Jesus?”
Salazar nodded gravely. “Or close enough,” he muttered. “The mad bastard’s been going around telling everyone he’s the messiah, and since you made him to be a bloody actor, he’s charming and persuasive enough that people are actually believing him. He’s already got his own cult with thousands of followers—here, listen, they play his speeches on Christian talk radio almost twenty-four seven.”
Salazar clicked the car radio on, and the monster’s eerily recognizable voice immediately came drifting out of the dashboard.
“… I am a created being,” he said. “Created by God Himself! In His image! As are all of you! And I am here to tell you that—”
“You get the picture,” Salazar grumbled. “Listening to that crap for too long makes me start to itch.”
“I-I-I had no idea,” Andi stammered. “I was so caught up with—with my—”
“Turning into a serial killer?”
Andi’s face turned bright red. “Well … yeah.”
Salazar sighed. “Well, the good news doesn’t end there,” he said. “See, because he’s a false messiah brought to life by demonic power that originated in Hell, he technically counts as the Antichrist. Kinda-sorta. It’s a bit of a stretch on the original wording if you ask me, but the boys upstairs are taking it as gospel … so to speak.”
“Oh,” Andi said quietly. “Um. That’s bad.”
“Oh, this passed bad a couple miles back,” Salazar said. “See, there are some contracts—some very old, very powerful contracts—that say as soon as the Antichrist appears on Earth, that’s it, game over, gentlemen start your engines for Armageddon.”
Over the course of seconds, Andi’s face went from bright red to pale as a sheet.
“So … we’ve … just … ended … the … world …?” she said slowly.
“Hey, where’d this we come from?” Salazar snapped. “It was your idea. Mostly. I mean, I only helped a little bit—And you still never put me in contact with your uncle!—but you know what, that’s not important now!” Still keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he turned around and started fishing around for something in the back seat. “What’s important is … we didn’t end anything.” He found what he was looking for—the broken-off end of a Hell battle-spear that he’d pilfered from one of the film sets—and dropped it into Andi’s lap. “I don’t care what kind of demon mojo is keeping him alive, we stick him with one of these things and we’re golden. No more Antichrist, no more Armageddon.”
Andi just stared down at the shabby, worn-down weapon lying across her knees. “This thing looks like it couldn’t kill an earthworm,” she said.
“Well, yeah, that’s why you’re here,” Salazar said. “The only way we’re gonna get that thing in his gut is if we jam it into one of the seams where you sewed him together. And you’re the only one who knows exactly where those seams are. So I figure you ought to be the one to do the actual stabbing.”
“What?!” Andi sputtered. “I can’t—I can’t just walk up and kill him!”
He just glared at her evenly. “Andi, our most conservative estimate is that you’ve killed at least two dozen people in the months since you created that son of a bitch. How is this any different?”
“Well—those were always in private!” she said. “If he’s a celebrity, this is probably going to have to be, like, a public assassination-type deal, and, like … I can’t do it with people watching me!” She sniffed and lowered her head. “And … and I’m scared.”
Salazar reached over and put an arm over her shoulders, still keeping the other hand on the steering wheel. “Hey, hey, don’t be scared!” he said. “I’m with you, and I know you can do this. We can do this.”
Andi glanced up. Something had changed about the rain splattering the windows of the car. It was heavier and thicker, and the droplets left a translucent film behind them as they trickled down, and—
It was blood.
The skies were raining blood.
She looked at Salazar. He had a wide, rictus grin in what was probably his attempt at a reassuring smile, but she could see the bags under his eyes and the worry lines creasing his face and the sweat trickling down his forehead. In the rearview mirror, Andi could see the clouds starting to clear and the sun rising behind them. The sky was bright red. And except for a thin layer of corona, the sun was pitch black.
“This … this is fine,” Salazar said, his smile twitching, and his voice cracking just a little as the two of them sped back towards Hollywood. “We can fix this!”
Brendan Mallory is a writer and cartoonist based in Los Angeles, CA. He’s had a lifelong affinity for the film industry (it’s kind of unavoidable when you grow up that close to Hollywood), and majored in the film program at California State University, Northridge, but eventually decided that his writing talents were better suited to prose, comics, and other print media. A number of his short stories have appeared in various issues published by Ahoy Comics; he currently publishes the webcomics I Think I’m a Penguin and Perverted Napkin Doodles through Line Webtoon; and he recently released his first novel, The President’s Head Is Missing! You should check them all out. They’re really funny.
Alien Pizza
Linda Maye Adams
Alien Pizza
The aliens didn’t mean anything, really. They just wanted pizza.
It was our third month after opening the gluten-free pizza parlor. Actually it was more of a shoebox. The storefront wasn’t very big so we called it Pizza Shoebox. My ex Hank wanted to name it after me, but I couldn’t see my name on the sign. I mean, who’d want Fizzy Pizza? Sounded like indigestion.
We’d done up the restaurant nice. Added a big plasma so we co
uld run old movies. The kind from the 1950s, mostly monster flicks and shoot-em-up Westerns, since we both liked those.
But the restaurant still looked like what it had been in its last incarnation: a Chinese restaurant.
Sometimes it still smelled like soy sauce.
The store had landed in our lap. Hank had won a boatload of money on one of those cooking shows (“Never again,” he said afterward), and then a friend suggested this place. It was in a strip mall with four other stores in walking distance of one of the movie studios. The rent? Dirt cheap for Los Angeles.
But we hadn’t asked questions, not even when we had to draw on our savings. Maybe we hadn’t wanted to.
I stood at the window, wistful as people walked by, glancing in, but not coming inside. The day dimmed into evening. The streetlights flicked on.
A police car pulled into one of our slots. Like everyone who had stopped by, they all avoided the closest spot to the entrance. That spot had been paved and repaved over so much that it looked like a body was buried under it.
The wind chimes on the door tinkled as the lone officer entered. Behind the counter, I heard Hank sigh.
He came out, smoothing out his apron. Even on that food show, he’d dressed nice like he was now: dress shirt, nice slacks, and Oxfords. Thin hair neatly trimmed. No weird piercings or tattoos. He believed in original parts only.
“What can we do for you, Officer?” he asked, his customer service hat on. “I’m Hank, and this is Fizzy.”
We knew the officer wasn’t here to buy food, given the six previous visits from other officers, but we didn’t want him to think we were rude.
The officer took off his hat and looked around. He paused to watch the movie playing on the plasma. A monster was chasing the heroine across a swamp.
He was older than the last one, with skin the color of an old penny and eyes that were friendly for a cop. His name badge identified him as Ruiz.
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