by Alan Spencer
The flashlight missed the figure, and it leapt out from behind the Chevy. The deputy had no time to react before something knocked the gun from his hand.
The object swung down again, too fast to be seen, and stripped the flashlight from his other hand. He stumbled against the wall, both wrists blazing in raw agony. The wrist bones jutted up from the skin, dislocated and broken on each hand. He couldn’t bend his fingers or move them at all.
Unable to fight back, he cowered into the office and yanked the door closed with his limp hands. He locked the door by pressing a round button on the brass knob. He let out a series of startled breaths as the pain seized him. The room closed in on him, spinning like a carousel from hell. The office was big enough for him to take two steps back before he hit the wall. The drapes were closed; he couldn’t see the perpetrator. He was unarmed and vulnerable. He tried to use the phone, but his fingers couldn’t manage the task, and before he could try again, the window shattered. Glass flew in all directions, and clear shrapnel struck him.
He cowered against the desk when the second window shattered. A mallet head was tangled in the blinds, before it was ripped back by the user. He wasn’t sure what to make of the weapon, but he didn’t have time to be rational. Arms reached through the blinds and drew him forward by the neck. Jagged glass sliced up his face and shoulder as he was forced out of the window frame and thrown onto the concrete.
Splayed on the floor, he shouted, “Stop—you’re under arrest! STOP!”
The perpetrator was a younger-looking man with long dark brown hair and mutton chops and a narrow face. A splash of blood across his lips reddened his smile. The deputy was baffled as to why the young man was wearing tan bellbottoms and a skin-tight white undershirt, but what really scared him was the mallet he raised over his head.
“My name is MALLET!”
The deputy crawled toward the door of the garage, but the young man was already upon him, the shadow encroaching and deadly close. “NO—DON’T!—DON’T!”
The mallet swung down with callous finality.
The killing blow.
2
The six dead men trampled through the woods armed with nails, hammers and bundles of wooden planks. After hours of hiking, they finally approached the dilapidated Ryerson house. As if compelled, they marched across the threshold and locked every door. Hammers and nails stuck 2x4’s against the windows and doors in a makeshift barricade. And while five of them worked, one of the corpses held back and stayed in the living room to perform its own errand. The blackened fingers picked up one of the reels of film at random in the steel bin: Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at the Funeral Home.
The corpse’s ripe fingers set the reel to play, and the movie began.
Spread out on the gurney, a naked body was slathered in blood from head to toe. Her smile disturbed trails of syrupy blood, the expression causing the red to dribble down her chin. The paint-thick mess was neon in the ceiling’s dome light. The woman was surrounded by shelves of embalming fluid, a trocar device, and an embalming machine. She reached from her position on the gurney and turned on the machine with a garbage disposal’s churn and suction. “More blood…I crave more blood!” she demanded.
The trocar needle spit out crimson bile into her mouth, splashing her tongue, and her milky-white substantial breasts. She panted in excitement, clutching the trocar like a phallic piece of meat with both hands. “The blood is the life. I want it inside of me!”
“Quit taking it all, you bitch!” Another head poked up from the floor, the woman’s face dry of blood—and she wasn’t happy about it. Her demonic face glowed cherry red with rage. The healthy lips opened and her nose elongated into a savannah wildcat’s, the tongue splitting down the middle—rubber in appearance—and her skin turned black and reptilian plated with an instantaneous metamorphosis. “Hand me that thing!”
The two fought over the trocar that spit globules of crimson across the floor and room. Three more women climbed down from the ceiling and walls to lap it from the lime tiles, each complete with demonic eyes and black plated reptilian skin.
The first vampire called out to someone who wasn’t in the room. “Where are you, Mr. Duvenick? Who have you dug up for us tonight?”
Mr. Ruden Duvenick bounded down the funeral hall’s steps in response. He was five-foot tall and meager in stature, in his late sixties, with peppered wiry hair. His hands were gloved and caked in black earth along with his boots. Another man, Doug Kirkenman, a stout three-hundred pound oaf, trudged in with a denim work shirt also stained in dirt. His long greasy hair traveled down to his shoulders with a Harley Davidson bandana wrapped around his forehead.
“We’re here, we’re here,” Duvenick replied, out-of-breath. “Outside we have three bodies exhumed. They were buried a week ago, three young men in fact—not over twenty. It was closed-casket.” His eyes shifted to each of the women. “And I didn’t embalm them.”
“Saves us money,” Doug added with a dry laugh. He smiled with his front three teeth missing. “Especially since the families still paid for the service.”
Two of the women, now in human form and completely nude, ambled closer to Ruden. One dropped to their knees and unzipped his pants, and the other stayed standing, looking Duvenick in the eye. Her lips were scarlet-red, her flesh fair and comely, her hair a mane of black curls, and her eyes were an Abyssinian green. She kissed his mouth and neck and licked his lips. “I guess we picked the right cemetery to barter blood, huh?”
“Why do you do it?” Duvenick dared to ask, made nervous by the showering of erotic attention. “W-where did you come from?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” the one in the back of the room replied. “You keep the bodies coming, and we’ll keep having sex with you. Mutually beneficial, right?”
“Being Satan’s lap-whore for a century taught us many tricks,” the one on her knees replied, sticking the man’s hardening erection into her mouth. “In fact, it’s won us the freedom of coming back from the dead.”
“What are you talking about?” Doug asked, overtaken by two women, who pushed him onto the gurney and began stripping him of his clothes in wild tearing actions. “You bitches are crazy.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think of us. That’s not your real concern. You should really be worried when the fresh blood runs out.” The woman glared into Duvenick’s eyes and rasped, “Because that is when we take yours.”
3
“This is the wishing well I was trapped inside of when I was eight years old,” Mary-Sue said. The well was lined with red bricks and a ramshackle roof. The water bucket was missing, but the pulley device remained intact. “I was playing hide-and-seek with neighborhood kids older than me. I don’t know how I got down without falling, but I couldn’t lift myself back up. I spent seven hours before anyone found me. Janie, my best friend, did find me, but she was too scared to help me and ran home. She eventually told someone, thank God. I could still be down there.”
Andy stared down into the hole and saw the brown water glint back up at him. It hadn’t been used for a time, and he imagined snakes, spiders, and God knows what else crawled below. “I’d go out of my mind down there. It’s amazing you made it seven hours.”
“It’s not like I had a choice.”
They’d hiked up and down Black Hill Woods for two hours now. The mosquitoes were biting his legs where his shorts didn’t protect him. Mary-Sue begged him to wear bug repellant, but he insisted it was fine, much to his regret. He’d eaten a lot of meat during the past few days, and the mosquitoes were attracted to the iron in his blood.
They walked on and stopped at the cliff’s edge to view Mary-Sue’s dairy farm in the distance. The cows were hidden specks; the glint of their eyes was all that could be seen. Further up the hill, they spotted his uncle’s house. It was a dark, haunted form, with nothing happening. He couldn’t imagine being a stranger hiking through the woods and coming upon the place and thinking, “Oh, let’s crash in here.
It looks safe enough.”
They traipsed away from the path—and Andy prayed he wasn’t walking through poison oak, ivy, or sumac—to better search for Jimmy. So far, their efforts proved fruitless.
They continued deeper into the woods.
The edge of his flashlight beam met a strange object. “Hey, do you see that?”
She trained her light on what leaned up against the tree. The edge of a leather boot jutted out from the top of a mulberry bush. “That can’t be my father.”
“Then who is it?”
He took a daring step forward, and Mary-Sue hung back. Half-way to the leather boot, he detected a square of pale skin: a bare foot, covered in lacerations and swollen bite marks that bored deeply into the skin, as if drill bits had punctured it.
“Don’t come any closer, Mary-Sue. Stay there.”
He drew back branches and shuddered at what he uncovered. He couldn’t see anything except the remains of a skeletal face picked clean—blood, and skin, and eyes and hair missing—and a tattered shirt that read Jack Off Jill in pink letters across the chest. The rest of the body was eaten through, barely anything left on the skeletal frame.
She demanded, “What is it?”
Mary-Sue moved toward the bush when he didn’t reply.
She was almost too close. “Turn back!”
He urged her in the opposite direction, and the farther they stepped away, the weaker her resistance became. She was crying, becoming hysterical. “What’s wrong, Andy? Why can’t I see it? Is it my father? It’s my father, isn’t it? Tell me, Andy, or I’ll go back and look.”
“No. It’s not him. It’s a body, but you don’t need to see it.”
“What does it look like? Maybe I’ll recognize it.”
Andy shivered at the mental image of the skeletal face with its jaw opened in a scream. He shook his head. “The corpse is unrecognizable. Maybe a wild animal attacked him, I have no idea. We should get out of here, either way. We can call the police when we get back to your house.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way back, subdued by troubled thoughts. Andy kept his eyes open for Jimmy, but doubted he was anywhere to be found. He hoped the man was safe, but given the condition of the body in the bush, foul play could be involved, and if there was one person dead, there could be others too.
The chirp of locusts dominated the woods suddenly, and Andy and Mary-Sue clapped their hands over their ears.
“They’re giving me a fucking headache,” Mary-Sue griped, swinging her head every which way. “Would they shut up? SHUT UP! FUCKING SHUT UP!”
Andy reached out and wrapped his arm around her waist to calm her. “It’s going to be okay. I know we came across a bad thing back there, but we’ll figure this out. The police will handle it. We will get through this.”
“I’m glad that wasn’t my father.” She forced back her tears. “He’s really putting me through a lot of stress. You won’t tell the police about his plan, will you? I know it’s an asshole thing to ask right now. It’s just that I don’t want him to go to jail.”
“I’d rather make him take over the damn house. He can steal the whole thing if he wants, for all I care.”
Mary-Sue’s mouth went agape.
He followed her stare and automatically backed away. The darkness obscured real definition of the object, but then Mary-Sue’s flashlight set it up in perfect light. It appeared to be a head with its face riddled with holes, the jaw and mandible visible underneath stringy patches of serrated skin. He turned from it appalled, the grotesque relic too horrifying to take in.
That was the second body in the woods.
Would there be more?
“Where’s the rest of the body?” he whispered to her, afraid the perpetrator was still in their vicinity. “What could really do that to a person?”
Neon green flickered in the night sky in dancing circles, like flying neon bulbs. The movements illuminated a car turned upside five yards from them. The dots pulsated and throbbed, and once Mary-Sue’s scream ripped out her throat, the spots took flight, chasing after them, bearing down on them. The raucous noise of gnashing wings increased to a deafening volume, making Andy’s ears ring in agony.
He shoved Mary-Sue in the opposite direction. “We have to run!”
“Where?” Mary-Sue screamed, taking off with him, both of them sprinting in retreat. Her head whipped back to face the incoming horde. “They’re coming from everywhere!”
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
They twisted through a stand of oaks and went sprawling down a short hill. Reaching the bottom, Mary-Sue tripped, tangled up in the vines of a naked jenny plant. He bent down to untangle her, and after freeing her up, they continued running through a stone and leaf strewn path. The insects hovered overhead, casting their incandescent beams, the world now an intense neon. It blotted out the night sky so nothing else existed except their neon attackers.
Mary-Sue caught her ankle against a lose rock, and tumbled again. Lifting her back up, Andy offered himself as a crutch to keep her moving. A locust swooped down and nipped at his ear, as if a single tooth had been shot into his skin. He crunched it with his fingertips and threw it aside, green fluids staining his fingers. The glow faded once the infernal insect was dead.
“They’re going to eat us alive!” Mary-Sue mewled in terror. “Just leave us alone!”
He wasn’t sure where to run next, the woods all the same in each direction. The sky threatened to come down upon them at any moment, and the colors seemed to burn brighter by the second.
He was disoriented by the green flashes. Mary-Sue breathed hard next to him, grunting in pain, her pace slowing. How much longer she’d be able to hold herself up was questionable now that he believed she’d twisted her ankle.
She yipped when two of the locusts buzzed at her neck. She slapped them both away, but they’d taken sizeable bites out of her. He could see the blood behind her ear.
He grew furious at the swarm, at Jimmy for putting them in the woods, and at the failure of logic to answer why locusts were glowing green and eating them.
Mary-Sue buckled to her side and faltered, and when he moved to help her, a dozen mouths bit into his back and tore through the fabric of his shirt. Spurred by pain and his blood infused with adrenaline, Andy made a split-second decision. He hoisted her up into his arms. He charged up a hill with the locusts chewing the skin from his shoulder blades. He couldn’t swat at them with his hands full. Many others joined in, taking turns biting at his deltoids and scalp, taking razor sharp pecks. Blood trickled down from his hairline and across his eyes and mouth.
At the top of the hill, a pond reflected the stars. Then the surface was obscured by a brilliant neon green haze. Still being bitten at every angle, he was left without any choice, so he dove into the water.
“Stay under,” he told her. “They can’t get you under the water!”
They separated once they sunk below the surface. The locust swarm was muffled from above. How long would it be before they left, he wondered, if at all? The need for air drew fire into his lungs. He combed the water for Mary-Sue, but he couldn’t find her, the waters so thick and dark at this time of night. He thrashed and kept searching, trying to deny the fact he was essentially drowning himself.
He’d been under a minute, or maybe thirty seconds. He lost all concept of time, and he was gasping to stay under longer, but also suffering from the dire need of that precious gulp of air.
Facing reality, he swam to the surface, stuck his head out, and breathed in and out, and two of the locusts stung his nose and eyebrow. He launched back down, back into the darkened waters. The escape route was a mistake, he realized. They were vulnerable here. The locusts’ muffled din made it impossible to think. He couldn’t plan beyond their hideaway under the water.
A set of legs flailed nearby, and Andy paddled toward them. Mary-Sue clutched onto him, and they anchored each other in the water. They waited, staring up at the green lights that wouldn’t leave. He w
anted to apologize for sending them both into an inescapable and watery grave.
The need for breath nagged at them both, and eventually they’d have to swim to the surface again, or else drown.
Chapter Ten
1
Lyle Banner, the evening mortician, sat in his office reading The New Yorker, and glanced up at the clock. It was 11:00 at night. He was in the basement of St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital, fifteen miles from James Ryerson’s house. There weren’t any new bodies for the first three hours of his shift except for what was stored earlier in the day. He expected Tim Weathers, a corpse courier, to arrive any hour with a fresh delivery. He’d heard from the grapevine the bad news about Cal Unger. Deputy Stafford disclosed tidbits about the man’s death. He was found in a dug-up grave, dead, but the details of how and why were left undisclosed.
He put down the magazine and swigged the rest of his coffee. The novelty mug read “Trust Your Mortician.” He eyed the hallway monitor screen—no one was coming. The rest of the hospital was busy with ICU patients and the spill-over from the Green County hospitals. St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital was comprised of four floors: emergency room/ICU, OB, PEDS and a recovery unit. The basement floor was the morgue and boiler room. Lyle would be lucky to encounter more than a handful of people tonight, living or dead.
Lyle checked the monitor again. Time for a cigarette break. Bastards won’t let me leave my post, so I’ll make do with my situation.
He lit a Camel and took a long drag. “Ah better, always better.”
Lyle turned on the corner fan and opened a window to allow the smoke to escape. Bart Adams, mortician supervisor, claimed he could smell the smoke in the air, but he never pursued it. Bart had performed many night shifts—“Shifts with the stiffs,” Bart called it—and understood how boring and long the hours could be.
Lyle brewed a fresh pot of coffee and performed a quick check on the bodies in back. He entered the back room, which was separated by a solid black door marked “Personnel Only.” The floor was tiled white, the walls mother-of-pearl. The double sink was adjacent to the plastic gurneys where the corpses were removed from body bags, tagged, and then filed into the walled slot to await further transport.
