by Alan Spencer
How about burning it?
He didn’t have gas, but there were road flares in his trunk. The sheriff fumbled with the lock and lifted it up. He opened a box and approached the figure with a flare in each hand. The sheriff struck one, the sizzle and flash of green illuminated the fallen man in strange hues. He shoved both of them into its mouth and ducked in case it tried to attack again. The monster’s head glowed a fluorescent green. The sheriff made out the shape of the skull underneath the skin, and he couldn’t help but watch as the head imploded. It melted, its nose becoming a sinkhole, as the stink of false flesh carried thick.
The rest of the man went up similarly, the body melting until it curled into a blackened stump of a human form. It happened so fast—under a minute—that he realized it didn’t have insides and the bones were so hollow they went up into smoke. He thought back to the man they dissected in Green County named Jorg. The butcher didn’t own working organs and the bones were cartilage. The connection was more than strange; it was downright harrowing. Logically, the two of them couldn’t exist.
A better truth: they weren’t human.
Agony caterwauled from the woods, and another shriek of the flying vampires followed. The touch of the last woman, the way she stroked him, it delivered a shutter of remembrance. He’d let the black demon pleasure him. He was foolish—and yet strangely human in his mistake. The women were too dangerous to arrest. They were better inspected when dead.
He raced into the woods and awaited another one of the women’s callings. The red eyes flashed for a split second in blink-speed fashion. The trees were melting and drops sounded from every direction. The blue-eyed man was dead, he reasoned, and now the damage he’d done to the land was being reversed.
“Shraaaaaaaah!”
Ba-BAM!
The 12 gauge blast lit up the night. He didn’t know if it hit its target. He neared the lake’s edge. The ice was thinning out and parts of it forked and separated. The shape of a fleeing body drove him to call out, “Hey you, get off the ice!”
The figure didn’t hear him.
You’re going to have to go after him.
“Damn it.”
He unloaded three more shots at the sky and then the 12 gauge went dry. He tossed it aside frustrated. The red eyes didn’t re-appear, and he assumed it was safe to tread cautiously. The first step against the ice, he rocked forward. It held strong for a moment until the gradual break increased. He chose his foothold carefully and hopped from one place to the other.
“This is Sheriff O’Malley, stop where you are! The ice is breaking. I’ll take you to safety.”
Wherever the hell that may be.
Nobody responded.
The kerplunk of ice in the near distance sent him into a fleeing panic. The vibration carried to his position. And the red eyes brightened nearer.
He removed the 9 millimeter from his holster; it almost slipped from his sweaty grasp. He kept it positioned to unload into the air, but he kept his focus on what surrounded him. “Where are you, man? Hurry before we both find ourselves in the freezing cold water.”
The two sets of eyes hovered in place enjoying his vulnerability. The two were in power, and he couldn’t do anything but pray they didn’t pounce on him before he was on dry land again where he could aim with accuracy.
“Over here!”
The sheriff couldn’t make out anything. The fog had dissipated but the night was still blind. “Follow my voice.”
Cracks simultaneously issued, and the sheriff was knocked to his knees. The ice turned into an island around him. The sheriff traced the nearest step to take and literally had to jump when the circle of ice he was standing on sunk into the water. He slipped underfoot on his lifeline and sprawled with his back against the sturdier chunk of ice.
Shit!
The layer cracked under his weight with a crystalline ring. He couldn’t shift or else he’d further set off the damage. The deformed shadow was stationed above him and threatened to swoop down arms first.
He didn’t hesitate to fire.
The creature tilted to the side and out of his line of vision, damaged but not dead.
He bobbed up and down. The water level hadn’t raised high enough to sink him yet. The cold bore through his clothing, wet and ice-cold. The sky tilted as he was rocked back and forth. The ends of the island were slowly melting.
He did his best to keep still, but soon, that wouldn’t be enough to stay alive.
3
“The CB connection is cut,” Kyle Redding explained to Frank Garrison in the Green County PD vehicle. He guided the vehicle to the outskirts of Anderson Mills. Two more miles, they’d come upon the bridge over Potter’s Creek that would direct them straight into town. “I’m not getting anything but fuzz. I’ve tried calling the department, and the line’s dead. Even the sheriff’s wife isn’t answering her phone. Usually Tabitha’s home at this time of night, and so is he. Either he’s putting in some overtime, or there’s something weird going on in that hick place.”
Garrison slurped the remains of his coffee in a Thermos canister. “The way things have been going in Anderson Mills, you think the whole law enforcement is on a break. Their job is easy. Set speed traps. Catch children stealing candy bars. Pull over the teenagers who’ve tanked on booze. I don’t see why they’re not answering.”
“It’s more than that,” Redding said. “I’ve known the sheriff for years. He’s thorough. If anything chaps his ass, he’s on top of it. He’s called me four times today about the butcher’s corpse. Even that visit to the lab, he wasn’t satisfied, and neither was I. This is paranormal shit. Area 51.”
“Except we’re in Kansas. There’s got to be an explanation about the corpse—what’s his name, Jorg?”
“This is something out of our league,” Redding agreed. “We’re crime scene investigators, not rogue FBI or CIA. This was a serial killer. Somebody did something to that man to make him want to cannibalize and mutilate people in a perverted fashion. Why in Anderson Mills, I’m not sure. I guess if someone’s going to perpetrate a crime of that magnitude, Anderson Mills would be a safe bet, at least easier than in a city.”
“Bodies were hanging from walls,” Garrison said. “Even at Wayne Brooks’ sandwich place, the sicko had a stack of breasts in a plastic bin. What the fuck was that about?”
Redding rolled down the window and caught a stiff breeze roll by. “Damn, it’s cold.” He checked the digital temperature gauge on the dashboard. “Thirty-four degrees, that’s fucking strange. It usually doesn’t get any cooler than seventy during the summer. It’s supposed to be sticky and humid. Ice cream couldn’t melt in this weather.”
Redding lit a cigarette, and Garrison extended his hand to take the next drag. “You’re still smokin’ menthols?”
“Cancer sucks,” Redding retorted. “Plus Cindy said when I smoke regulars it’s like kissing a turd.”
The acidic quality to the air warned Redding it was about to storm. The sky was exempt of tell-tale sounds: no lightening bolts or thunder. He recalled the forecast on the local weather station promise a dry week, not even sprinkles.
“What’s up with this weather, seriously?”
“Global warming,” Garrison joked. “Our glaciers are melting, polar bears are drowning, and next thing you know there won’t be a North Pole—and that means Santa Claus and his elves will sink to the bottom of the ocean.”
Redding rolled his eyes. “Shut up. I like Santa Claus.”
“It can’t be any weirder than finding Cal Unger’s body mutilated at the cemetery,” Garrison quipped. “He was torn from the inside out. It screams necrophilia. Ed Gein’s cousin is horny.”
Redding was about to explode with laughter when something at the end of the road struck him odd. “You see a bridge?”
“No.”
“Exactly. We passed the sign half a mile ago. We should be seeing it any moment.” Redding squinted harder. He turned on the cruiser’s brights. “I can’t see anything,
the fog’s too thick.”
Then Redding braked hard after almost crashing into one of the steel pillars at the edge of the bridge. Stopping at a safe enough distance, he put the vehicle into park and stepped out. He immediately noticed he could see his breath. “Why’s it so cold?”
Garrison rushed to the bridge. “This thing is iced over. It’s at least a foot thick in ice. Impossible.”
“We can’t drive on this.” Redding stared at the bridge encapsulated in ice. They couldn’t view the entire bridge that was a quarter of a mile long; the fog was too thick. “I can’t even see five feet in front of me.”
He studied the trees; they were shrouded in the same fog. Wisps of white blinded every landmark. Anderson Mills was invisible underneath the veil. It swirled and coagulated to create thicker sheets. The covering shifted and moved, almost breathed.
“How do you explain this? Should we try and drive across the bridge.”
Redding spoke his mind. “I have a bad feeling about this. Nobody answers their phone, there’s silence on the CB line. And now this frozen over bridge. I don’t know what to think about it.”
“Ice cream’s definitely not melting tonight,” Garrison scoffed. He pointed at the jagged icicles columnar-like and hanging from top to the bottom like iron bars across the bridge. “We couldn’t even cross the thing if we wanted to. It’s completely blocked us out.”
Garrison wrapped his arms around it and couldn’t connect his hands when he hugged the ice column. “It’s frozen solid.”
Redding moved through the grass and tried to walk down the hill, but he kept losing his footing. Everything was clouded, the ground slippery with frost. “I can’t maneuver. I’m calling for help. Maybe we can go to sky view. One of Green County’s choppers can check it out.”
They returned to the vehicle to make the call.
An hour later, still stationed at the bridge, Redding slammed the CB radio back in place. “They say the chopper can’t fly above Anderson Mills. Low visibility—more like no visibility—makes it too dangerous to fly. They may tangle up in trees or power lines, and if they can’t see to land, they’re screwed.”
“S-so what do we do? Are we just going to wait it out?”
“Headquarters wants us to stay up here until more help shows up. They say they’ve sent other patrols into Anderson Mills, but every access is frozen over like this bridge. How do you explain it?”
“How do you explain a serial killer with a quarter-sized brain and no internal organs. This really is way out of our league—anybody’s league.”
“Then I guess we wait, huh?” Redding growled. “I hate this.”
“Maybe it’s a freak ice storm. Global warming, like I said.”
“The temperature change was so sudden, though. It was seventy-one degrees, and then it was thirty something degrees. No, this is fucked up. No one can explain this, and that’s why I want to see the other side of that bridge.”
“You can’t cross it. You said so yourself.”
“I know, I know. We’re trapped outside of Anderson Mills. Whatever the hell’s going on over there, we won’t know anything for awhile.”
Chapter Fourteen
1
The rodent’s arm bashed through a slit in the basement door, swatting for them with its nubby pink fingers. Andy stayed in front of Mary-Sue at the very back corner of the basement. The rat had them cornered, once it made its way through. The hinges snapped. The wooden 2x4 across the center of the door remained intact, but it wouldn’t hold for long.
The door was turned into kindling bit by bit. The rat punched and leveled its weight into the door with unrelenting power. Andy heard the door break in two, and the rat clawed the pieces behind him, clearing the way. The rat’s drooling maw snapped the center board in half and destroyed the door frame by its enlarged sides impacting against them. Wood crumbled in plaster-sized debris in its wake, and that fast, the rat was on the stairs. The shadows parted to reveal the monster’s teeth, each one slathered and wet by the slab of a tongue wider than a textbook. Saliva pattered the staircase. It whipped back and forth and forced its body through the door.
“It’s coming!” Mary-Sue screamed. “Do something, Andy. For God’s sake, do something!”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
She scanned the basement for an answer. “Throw something at it.”
He picked up a laundry hamper and heaved it at the rat. It swiped it out of its way and hissed.
She scoffed at his weapon choice and discovered a baseball bat and heaved it next. The rat clamped down on the wood and broke it in half.
The rat was poised to lunge down the steps at them. Its two front legs were up in the air, the fingers bent as gnarled weapons. The hind legs rippled with muscle underneath the sandy-colored fur and layers of extra skin.
He forced Mary-Sue to stay behind him. He wasn’t sure what next to do, so he picked up a fire extinguisher and raised it. “Maybe this will scare it off?”
“Do it! Now, before it gets down those stairs.”
He extended the nozzle end toward the enemy, but before he could do anything else, the entire staircase collapsed. The rat was heaved forward, the round body spinning upside down and careening onto the concrete floor head-first in a spinning mess.
Crick!
He winced after the bone’s snap. The rat’s mouth was a slit, trails of blood glomming down from both sides of it. Its eyes were silver buckshot, cold and distant. The body didn’t move. The white belly and legs were locked in the air as if caught in a mouse trap.
Just like in Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana, Andy thought. The resemblance of the rat from the movie was uncanny. He couldn’t let it go as coincidence.
Mary-Sue popped out from behind him and drove a twenty pound free weight into the rat’s skull. It gave under the weight, and the buckshot circles were spat out followed by globules of blood by the pint. She then cowered behind him at the mess. “I fucking hate those things! Disgusting even when they’re dead.”
He stared at the smashed-in skull. There weren’t broken fragments, just brittle pieces and no brain matter beneath. And then a noxious odor gurgled from the rat’s bowels and scented the air. It wasn’t the stink of feces, but cow carcasses. The smell was confirmed when the stomach deflated and the sack-for-a belly split open. Strands of red stained white and black spotted fur and digested innards stained the floor.
“Fucking Christ!” She pinched her nose. “What the hell is this thing?”
“Let’s step out,” he suggested, taking her by the arm. “We don’t need to keep looking at this.”
The staircase was in ruins, but it was intact enough to tread one careful step at a time. Soon, they reached the top. As they came upstairs, he had to catch Mary-Sue in his arms when she slipped on the turpentine in the hallway. Moving on, he tried the phone in the kitchen, but it was dead—as he already knew, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity to check again. Mary-Sue rummaged through the drawers and selected a twelve inch carving knife.
“That thing’s huge. You carve turkeys with that thing or what?”
“Pumpkins.” She gave him a crooked smile. “Only pumpkins.”
He followed her lead, stealing a meat tenderizer. The idea of going up against something like a rat or locusts with a knife or meat tenderizer was ridiculous, and he knew it. “What are we doing, really?”
“It makes me feel better, okay?” She peered out of the window above the sink at the acres of dead cattle. “That thing stinking up the basement has killed everything. So much for the dairy farm and so much for my dad.”
He couldn’t deny the obvious. Jimmy Jennings had to be dead. He’d been missing long enough, and the bodies they discovered ravaged in the woods was another reason to believe the unexplained. “I can’t lie to you, Mary-Sue, but I can say we’re escaping this mess and getting a straight answer as to why that thing in the basement can exist. Let’s drive the hell out of here, okay? I left my cell phone at my house. I can
call for help there. It’s worth a try.”
Her face was drained of color, the disgusted tears standard to the grieving package. She planted both hands on the sink, knelt over and threw up with a painful retch. She turned on the sink and flicked on the garbage disposal. She washed out her mouth and shook her head.
“None of this adds up, Andy. Why are we even alive? We’re very lucky that rat stumbled down the stairs and broke its neck. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if it didn’t? I don’t want to die like that, not tortured, or, or devoured.”
Andy forced out the next words. “It’s out of our hands what’s going on. A logical explanation is too much to ask right now. We can guess all night or we can try and call for help. I’m sorry your father’s gone. He’d want you to be safe no matter how you two got along. Nobody can say where that rat came from or why the locusts attacked us. We’ll worry about it when we’re somewhere safe. Somebody has a shit-load of explaining to do, but for now, let’s get the hell out of here.”
She washed out her mouth again and wiped her face dry with a hand towel. “Okay.” She picked up the knife. “But I’m not going anywhere without a weapon.”
He lifted up the meat tenderizer. “You got it.”
They walked outside and checked each direction. He turned to Mary’s truck. The windows were smashed, the hood over the engine removed and the engine block was serrated by teeth-shaped markings.
“The vermin destroyed the truck. Why would it do that?”
He was shocked himself. “I, well, I don’t know.”
“What do we do now?”
He studied the surrounding woods. So far, it appeared to be unoccupied. They wouldn’t get anywhere staying at her house, and now that they didn’t have transportation, they had no choice but to walk to his house and make the call from his cell phone. It was the logical choice, but also the dangerous one.
“I guess we walk to the house.”
She grimaced at the suggestion. “I hope nothing else is out there.”
“Me too.”
2
The walking corpses were on alert at the Ryerson house. Four manned the windows and the fifth one was stationed across from the blank screen. The decayed fingers scanned the reels to make the next choice after The Hospice Massacre ended. Stacks of reels were shoved aside, sorted through with haste, for the corpse wanted something more devious and devastating. The town would die, and after that, the surrounding cities and towns would follow. The spirits of the dead demanded a movie torturous and sadistic beyond reason.
