B-Movie Reels

by Alan Spencer

  “Hello, dead people,” he laughed dryly. “Roll call begins in five minutes. You guys stay in your shelves for the time being, okay?”

  There was a click from the bottom row, and Lyle froze.

  He eyed the slot, startled.

  This wasn’t the first time someone had been placed into the slot alive. It happened fifteen years ago, a month into his internship. Carl Wassermann, a barber who’d suffered heart palpitations, was found belly down in his shop and not breathing. The ambulance crew marked him dead, but when he was in the slot, the man awoke and cried out, “GET ME OUTTA HERE NOW!”

  The only difference between Mr. Wassermann and now was that the person inside didn’t beg to be released. Lyle’s fear changed into anger. Pranksters—especially drunk teenagers short enough to crawl into the slots and shut them on their own—were known to hide in the nooks so they could steal formaldehyde and huff it. Kids liked to pass out, and Lyle supposed it was better than self-asphyxiation, but it still wasn’t healthy.

  Lyle went about inspecting the other slots, but then there was more shifting throughout the rows. He opened the closest one in curiosity, and gasped at the woman inside of it lying beside a male corpse.

  She was startled at the intrusion. “Don’t hurt me, please.”

  The woman turned to him. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Magenta red hair flowed down her fair and unblemished face. Blue eyes gazed up at him, frightened and innocent. She was wearing only a bra and panties, both of which were made of sheer white fabric. Lyle made out the pink of her nipples, the buds raised around the areolas, and looking south, he was drawn to her strawberry bush. He didn’t mean to look, but the woman didn’t seem to mind.

  “W-what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” She lowered her eyes timidly. Her lips pouted, glossed over in cherry lipstick. “I woke up a moment ago. I’m really scared, mister. Can you take me home?”

  He searched for a lab coat to drape over her body even though he enjoyed looking at her, a lean one-hundred and fifteen pound body with C-cup breasts. The breasts were taut enough that you could stick a pencil underneath them and it would fall. Her thighs were perfect curves, her ass snug against the sheer fabric. The legs were smooth from a fresh shave.

  Snapping out of his appreciation for her body, he asked, “What’s your name, you poor thing? We’ll get you help, okay?”

  “I’m Jenna,” she replied. She reached out and placed both hands on his shoulders. “You’re so nice to me. What can I do to repay you for your kindness?”

  “Um, nothing.” He was confused by the question. “Someone’s in deep shit, though. How this happened, I’ll find out and make sure their ass is shit canned. I’m so sorry. Do you remember how you got here? You must be so scared.”

  Jenna pressed her mouth against his in a kiss that started softly, and then she forced his hand down the front of her panties. She whispered, “Comfort me.”

  He trembled at the sudden closeness of the woman. She was wet between her legs, and Jenna urged his fingers inside her. Lyle grew hard instantly. It’d been two weeks since he’d slept with his wife, and Rebecca didn’t look anything like Jenna. There was at least a seventy pound and a fifteen year difference, and unlike Jenna, it wasn’t this easy to turn her on.

  They kissed harder, and he was fingering her. The woman rolled her head back and moaned in pleasure. “You’re so good to me…soooooo good.”

  The squeak of metal sounded and four of the other slots on the wall opened. Women dressed similarly to Jenna and equally as attractive closed in on him. The only difference between the four and Jenna was the blood pasted on their lips and dripping off of their chins.

  “What, what the hell is this?”

  “Shhhhh,” Jenna whispered, running her tongue over his lips. “It’s okay.”

  Lyle threw her aside, gasping at what had been done to the corpses inside the slots. Their necks had been chewed into ribbons, the jugular and femoral arteries tapped dry.

  The five women blocked the exit, with Jenna taking the lead. “Dead bodies don’t fight back when we take their blood. It’s so much easier hunting dead prey, you see. The living always make such a big fuss.”

  Jenna’s incisor teeth extended out the soft gum tissue and turned into jagged weapons.

  He put it together.

  “Vampires?” He uttered, not believing it. “No—no! What are you? Why are you here?”

  “The dead don’t refuse us their blood,” she reiterated. “The freshest dead necks are waiting in the morgue, but your neck is fresher. I can smell it running in your veins. I’M HOT FOR YOUR BLOOD!”

  The five swooped upon him at once, like a synchronized mob. He reached for the exit door, but he was shoved backward onto the floor, handled by the neck. He shrieked at the sight of their leather-like wings protruding from their shoulders and extending the length of the room. Talons shot forth from their fingertips. Their eyes brightened from blue to demonic red. Muscles enlarged their bodies, their smooth and slender forms now covered in black reptilian scales.

  The five bore down on him, and after moments of blood being sucked from every limb of his body, his heart finally ceased to beat.

  2

  Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at the Funeral Home ended an hour ago, and now the lone zombie in the living room loaded the next reel: The Freezer. The five other corpses stood vigil behind the boarded windows and continued to let the film play out.

  The shot pans over a warehouse marked with a brown and white wooden sign that reads “Pilsner’s Best Ale Production and Distribution Company, Delaware City.” The sign was underscored with the line “Delaware’s Coldest Brew Since 1905.” Darkness obscured any details of background or city surrounding the warehouse, but the Super 8 quality of film was the culprit, not the night itself. The scene cut to inside the factory where stacks of crates stocked with longnecks were head-high. A man in his mid-forties in a blue khakis work uniform with a name badge marked Willis Salter was passed out on the concrete floor with dozens of empty bottles strewn about.

  “Salter’s kid is drunk on the job again,” one of the two factory overseers said. The talker was near retirement age with wild gray hair and sucking on the end of an unlit cigar. He wore business suit, being the brains of the operation. “Dwayne Salter hasn’t set foot in this bottling plant for six months and he hasn’t seen his piss-off boy screw his chance at a promotion. Willis expected a position like ours at the big table of hot shit stockholders without putting in his dues. Damn it, we earned our titles. Willis doesn’t even have to work assembly line duty. He just has to see that no one breaks into the plant. It isn’t that difficult. The apple fell far from the tree and then someone squashed it.”

  The second person, a foreman with a smug face and in the kind of same uniform as Willis Salter, scratched his balding hair. He was Stan Kudger, a long-time manager of operations. “I’m just a peon, Mr. Piedmont, but I know better than to screw myself out of a good job. The yeast, it smells like pizza, and I get a discount on the beer—the best beer in Delaware. I get health benefits, too, and I’ve never drunk on the job. This is a great job.”

  Mr. Piedmont knelt on his haunches and slapped the boy’s cheek. “Wake up, son.”

  Willis groaned and turned to his side.

  “How many times does this make it, Stan?”

  “Drunk for the sixth time in less than two months,” Stan said, after thinking a moment. “And the place was robbed the second time he was blitzed out of his head.”

  “I’d hoped he’d die of alcohol poisoning by now,” Mr. Piedmont griped. “But Mr. Salter owns the company, and he won’t give up on his son. I was afraid of this. Our stock has plummeted since that robbery. Some hack reporter got a picture of ol’ Willis sleeping around a stack of bottles when the robbery was on the public news. I was surprised they didn’t get a picture on the front page with his thumb up his ass, the jack-off. We’re losing business because of this fuck-about ki
d.”

  Mr. Piedmont removed a plastic baggie from his suit pocket. “This should do the trick.” He emptied the white powder onto Willis’s nose and fingertips. “Snorting cocaine on the job is not only signs of malfeasance, it’s illegal. We’ll keep it quiet, have Mr. Salter come down here and reprimand his boy in person, then we’ll see how many chances this kids gets.”

  “But Willis will argue to his pa. It won’t work.”

  “That’s not all we’re going to do,” Mr. Piedmont replied, pointing to Willis’ legs. “Pick up his feet, I’ll take his arms. Carry him to the freezer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do it, or it’s your ass!”

  Stan did as he was instructed. Large assembly lines with rolling pins loomed in the far background with more boxes of ale, and the freezer they stopped at looked like a silver-painted cardboard box. Dry-ice fog poured into the room when the door opened—the door itself wobbled, not metal but paperboard—and the two dropped Willis inside. Mr. Piedmont then locked the freezer.

  “Willis was on the job drunk with cocaine in his system,” Mr. Piedmont said. “He accidentally locked himself in the freezer. It’s set at 34 degrees, and he’ll certainly freeze in there. You won’t speak a word of this to anyone, Mr. Kudger. You have a future in the company, I’ll see to it. You keep your nose clean, I’ll promote you to shipping manager, and then you’ll slowly work your way up the ladder.” He laughed and patted Stan on the back. “Hey, accidents happen, right?”

  “Okay, sir. I’ll turn the other way. Accidents happen, like you said…”

  The two vacated the building, and then there was a wide-panning shot of the warehouse and then a lightning bolt in the distance. Then lightning struck the warehouse twice, the cartoon branch striking hard. A fire broke out in many sections of the warehouse. Sparks exploded and quickly fizzled into smoke. Mr. Piedmont and Stan Kudger bolted from the scene, but as they reached the parking lot, a figure walked from the building.

  Willis Salter.

  “W-w-what is this?” Mr. Piedmont stammered. “His hair’s snow white…and he’s so pale.”

  “It cold all of a sudden,” Stan added, crossing his arms to warm up. “How did he get out?”

  Willis extended both hands at them and icicles torpedoed out of his skin. The scene cut to Stan with icicles jutting out of both eyes, his mouth extended in a circle of agony. Mr. Piedmont’s chest was pegged with six of the icicles, his chest bloodied through the suit.

  The man now known as the Freezer towered above the two dead bodies, speaking in a heavy voice. “Hey, accidents happen.”

  3

  Sheriff O’Malley parked beside the unoccupied patrol vehicle. The gas pumps were illuminated by the garage’s lights, and from his vantage point, the color of blood shone brilliantly against the concrete floor. The shop itself was empty.

  Where were Deputy Stafford and Walter Smalls?

  The station stank of foul play.

  He aimed his Smith & Wesson .28 revolver at the shop. His plan: catch the criminal in the act by surprise. The dread of knowing his deputy was in danger, potentially dead, sent him into a short sprint toward the garage’s opening. That’s when a sharp cold breeze cut across his face. It wasn’t an evening gust. It was sub-artic and capable of inflicting frostbite. His face stung from the cold. The sides of the shop’s walls glistened with a layer of ice and the ceiling was jagged with icicles. The floor had cracked in forks from the bitter cold, and the puddles of blood on the floor crystallized.

  He crept into the garage and turned his body to each corner, trained to take precautions. Nobody waited out in the open. The office windows were broken and more red spatters and trails slathered the walls. The freezing air raised painful gooseflesh along his arms. The gun in his hand wavered, shivering in the cold. He wondered if the criminal was watching him suffer in the extreme temperature. He couldn’t figure out the source of the climate change, and the car lifts, frozen over and coated with ice, offered no clues.

  Two shadows lurked at the back of the room, grabbing his attention. “Freeze, both of you!”

  “You said it,” one man growled with visible breath, the vibration of his voice shaking the ground, it was such a deep bellow, as if a lion was roaring. He stepped out of the dark, and the sheriff didn’t believe his eyes. The figure was average height and weight, but his skin and eyes were a baby blue. The man’s hair hung down to both shoulders in albino locks. The stranger was accompanied by a younger man wearing bell bottoms and a white-undershirt and brown muttonchops. It’d been years since the sheriff had seen muttonchops that thick—not since his days at Park Hill Police Academy in 1968.

  The blue man had pinned his deputy’s body up against the wall. His face was mashed inward, the nose broken, the eyes forced from their sockets, and his front teeth shattered. His co-worker was obviously dead, but the man with blue eyes touched his hand, and in an instant, the deputy’s body was swallowed up in ice the shape of a casket.

  The younger man reached behind him for a large mallet. That’s when the sheriff caught sight of another body behind the Chevy, trapped in an ice shell.

  Walter Smalls.

  “Hold it, boy!” he warned, this time steadying his gun. “Both of you stop what you’re doing. Don’t move!”

  The albino stranger barked, “I think it’s you who won’t move!”

  He extended both hand and ice shards rocketed out of the palms.

  The sheriff ducked to his side, and the peg board of posters with bikini-clad woman splayed on vintage classic cars was impaled with icicles.

  Muttonchops raised the mallet above his head and smashed it across the deputy’s midsection in a single swing. The deputy was frozen to the core, and his body exploded into hundreds of pieces. The sheriff swallowed hard and raced to his patrol vehicle, too afraid to take them on. The two pursued him into the street as he madly righted his steering wheel after backing up the car.

  “You bastards!” He retrieved the CB radio and dialed in the dispatcher. “It’s O’Malley, call in back-up—all the cars you got! We’ve got a serious situation. Two are dead on the scene, and there are two suspects at large.”

  He waited for an answer.

  “Hello? Gloria, are you there? Put down your blueberry muffin and Esquire and listen up. Anybody listening, hey—THIS IS SERIOUS!”

  He pounded the dashboard. “Shit!”

  Panic raced through his veins as his blood pressure boiled. “This isn’t good. What the hell is—”

  The tear of metal sounded above him, and three talon marks sliced the ceiling of his car.

  A strange howl erupted from the sky, the darkness spitting out a winged figure soaring far above the tips of the trees, gargoyle-like, but slender and female. Its skin was black with scales, the red eyes glowing like taillights. The creature moved with insane speed, and without warning, the driver’s side door was smashed open and a set of claws tore into his shoulder and arm. The hideous elongated face opened its maw with incisors sharp as box cutters and licked the blood from its fingertips with a forked tongue.

  The pain surging up his left side was blinding. The wheel was slick with his blood, and he lost control. The patrol car skidded, and he slammed the brakes. It rolled from the road, and he was sent crashing head-first into a pair of oak trees. The crunch of steel, the deafening crash of the windshield, the axle breaking from underneath him, and the jostle of his body as it was sent forward and ripped back by his seatbelt all occurred before he could anticipate the air bag engaging.

  SAH-POW!

  Whip-lash rocked his neck. Everything spun, and he failed to lock his eyes on any single object. He gagged on the powder that was shaken free from the airbag. He couldn’t remove the image of the red eyes and the woman’s mouth gaping with saber teeth.

  He couldn’t lift himself with the airbag in his way. He popped open the compartment between the seats for a screwdriver—he kept it there after someone told him he could break the window if he should ev
er crash underwater—and tore the air bag with the appropriate end.

  He unlocked the pump-action Jamison 12 gauge secured between the seats and rolled out of the car. He didn’t have any broken bones, but his neck ached in unison with his lower back. His wounds were still fresh and burning, but he the pain to scan the woods for signs of the flying creature.

  “Where are you?” He used the back door as a crutch. The stink of burned rubber wafted in his direction. “You bitch, where did you go?”

  He pumped the shotgun ready for a chase and aim game. He stopped when the last sound he expected to hear beckoned him from the smashed end of the vehicle.

  “Help me,” the wincing voice begged. Blood glazed her chin and coughed out of her throat at each word. “I can’t move. I…can’t…move.”

  The sheriff eased his stance. The front car lights revealed a woman caught between the steel bumper and a tree. Her eyes were wild in agony. Her bare chest was caved-in by the force of the bumper.

  “Dear God,” he gasped. “I didn’t see you in the road.”

  Now that he’d stared at her long enough, it registered that she was naked. Her raven-black hair was smooth and silky, and her face was soft. She had perfect full lips and brown eyes.

  “I was walking home,” she managed to say. “And you came barreling out of nowhere. Save me. I’m in so much pain. You’ve got to back the car up, if you can.”

  She shouldn’t be alive.

  The woman wouldn’t be able to talk. She’d be in shock at the loss of blood.

  And why’s she naked?

  The woman continued her pleas. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

  He couldn’t react.

  That’s when the hood suddenly shot out a handful of sparks, and the vehicle was enveloped in flames. The woman’s body immediately blackened, caught in the fire. Her flesh hardened into scales, and the wild red eyes burned deeper than the flames that ate into her outer shell. The stench was horrendous, ten times as potent as burning tires.