by Ronald Kelly
“If there’s an animal in there, sir,” said McMahon, “why can’t I hear anything?”
Paul shrugged. “How should I know? You could sure as hell hear it fifteen minutes ago!” He shuddered at the memory of those wet, ripping, slurping sounds.
“I’ll take your word for it… right now. But you stay put, do you understand?”
Paul swallowed dryly and simply nodded.
The elder officer turned to his subordinate. “Okay, this is how we’re gonna work it, Jasper. You jimmy the lock and open the door. I’ll shoot the thing when it comes out.” He jacked a shell into his twelve-gauge Mossberg with a metallic click-clack.
“Gotcha,” agreed Jasper. His hands trembled as he stepped to the driver’s door and began to slowly insert the narrow length of the Slim-Jim past the blood-soaked window and down into the body of the Cadillac’s door.
Frank McMahon stepped into the center of the highway and lifted his shotgun, bringing the butt securely against his shoulder. “Okay. I’m ready.”
Jasper fished around with the jimmy until something within the door went click. “Get ready. Here goes!” Then he grasped the handle and pulled open the door.
At first, nothing happened. Then Deputy McMahon’s eyes widened. “What the shit?”
Paul watched as the thing burst from gore-encrusted cave of the Escalade, leaping straight toward the lawman. It was bigger… twice as big as it had been before… and, it seemed, twice as fast. It barreled out of the vehicle; sharp jaws gnashing, a deep, thunderous roar rumbling up from out of its gullet.
Deputy McMahon managed to put a load of double-aught buckshot smack-dab in the center of the thing’s chest, but wasn’t able to jack another round into the breech. The creature landed atop him, seemingly unharmed. The officer cried out as he hit the pavement hard, his eyes bulging as the monster’s teeth burrowed deeply into the tender flesh of his throat.
“Do something!” screamed Paul. “Shoot it!”
Deputy Jasper dropped the Slim-Jim and nervously fumbled his service revolver from its holster. He held it in both hands, pointing it at the thing on top of his partner. During his hesitance, the thing brought its powerful jaws together in a bone-shattering crack! His victim’s head separated from the neckbone, rolling lopsidedly across the highway, stump over balding scalp.
Jasper looked over at Paul in indecision. “I… I might hit Frank.”
“Frank’s head is in the freaking ditch!” Paul yelled at him. “Shoot the damn thing!”
The deputy turned back and pumped the contents of his .38 into the back of the creature’s head and spine. Instead of suffering from the gunfire, the thing seemed to regard it as a annoyance. It looked over its shoulder, shook its leering head as if saying “Stupid bastard!”, then lashed out with its bristly black tail. The blow took Jasper’s right hand off at the wrist. Both severed fist and the gun clutched tightly within it crashed through the windshield of the patrol car, leaving a jagged black hole.
“Mama!” croaked poor Jasper, just before the black thing whirled and turned its fury and hunger on him.
“To hell with this!” muttered Paul. He turned and began to run down the stretch of Highway 987.
He was crossing the road, intending to head toward the farmhouse, when he heard a great, bellowing roar split the air behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and immediately pissed himself. The thing was bounding down the two-lane blacktop toward him, its paws shattering the asphalt with each heavy footfall. Its awful hunger had fired its metabolism and started a growth process that could only occur in things not fully of this world. The black-bristled creature was nearly as big as the Escalade now. Its open mouth, full of long ivory and ragged meat, looked large enough to swallow a man whole without gagging.
Paul bounded over the drainage ditch at the far side of the road, then scrambled over a barbed wire fence. He was nearly over, when his left foot became entangled in the strands. As he struggled to kick free, the thing’s head appeared. The jaws found its target, dipped downward, and chomped. As burning agony shot through Paul’s ankle and up the calf of his leg, he looked back to see the thing rolling something around in its mouth. It was a pocket of Eddie Bauer leather with a meaty morsel of Paul Stinson tucked neatly inside. The thing gobbled it down and winked – dear Lord, did it actually wink? – before it began to skitter across the fence toward him.
On half a foot, Paul began to limp toward the farmhouse, gibbering, crying, even laughing for some awful reason he couldn’t figure out. “God, God, God, oh, God,” he sobbed out loud. Funny that he would call upon that name so freely now… since the only way he had used it in the last few years was with the word damn tacked to end.
But, then, Paul Stinson had suddenly gotten religion, as the old folks called it. That awful kind of Harlan County religion preached by things that posed as harmless roadkill at the side of deserted country roads.
As he ran, shrieking, toward the old farmhouse, Paul sensed that the thing was toying with him. It would dart out in front of him, then circle him, allowing him to get a head start and then begin the torturous cat-and-mouse game all over again. He was almost to the front porch of the house, when the thing’s long tail lashed out, striking him across the lower back. Paul wailed as his kidneys ruptured and the lower vertebrae of his spine were pulverized into jagged splinters.
He hit the ground hard, facing the house. An old woman opened the screen door, looked out, then retreated with an expression ofpanic and horror. That door isn’t going to help you, lady, he thought. That whole damned house isn’t going to protect you. He doubted that the vault of the Harlan County Bank & Trust would hold up to this demon’s ceaseless hunger.
As the thing pounced and landed atop him, Paul thought of his mother and some of the quirky sayings she used to pass on to him. One came to mind as he felt the thing’s claws meticulously, almost tenderly, separate the back of his leather jacket and the cloth of the shirt just beyond. Curiosity killed the cat?
No, that wasn’t it.
It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Yeah. Oh, hell, yeah… that was it.
Paul Stinson felt the thing’s long, gray tongue – peppered with tastebuds the texture sandpaper and broken glass – run the length of his back, from the nape of his neck, clear down to the cleft of his buttocks. It somehow tickled and hurt all at the same time.
Paul began to laugh.
He laughed wildly, madly, straying far beyond the limits that humor tastefully allowed … until, finally, he could laugh no more.
THE FINAL FEATURE
“Billy Bud!” hollered Big Vern, banging on the ceiling of the concession stand with a mop handle. “Get the wax outta your ears, boy!”
“Yeah, Daddy?” In the projection booth above, Billy Bud had been reading an old dog-eared copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland in the flickering light of Projector Number One.
“I forgot and left the reels for the second feature at the house,” his father told him. “Run over there right quick and get it, will you? It’s on the kitchenette table.”
“Yes, sir!”
Billy Bud Grandstaff laid his magazine aside and looked over at Projector Number Two. His father was right. The contraption was empty, no second feature reels on it at all. Wasn’t like his papa to be so forgetful. No, that was pretty much his job.
He opened the steel door of the projection booth, made his way down the concrete steps, and hightailed it to the “house”, as his daddy called it. It was more like a single-wide trailer located at the back property line of the drive-in theatre lot. A rusty, white-and-aqua Fleetwood from the sixties, perched precariously atop cinderblock columns.
Billy Bud was Vern Grandstaff’s only son and not a very bright one at that. Big Vern bragged, almost proudly, that Billy Bud wasn’t the sharpest lawn mower blade in the shed, and he reckoned he couldn’t deny it. After all, he was forty-three, still living at home with his mama and daddy, and working the only job he had ever had; running the projectors at Big Vern’s
Drive-In Theatre on Highway 70 West.
Halfway to the trailer, Billy Bud glanced back over his shoulder. They were showing a double-feature that night. Iron Man and Madagascar 2, that movie with the talking lion and zebra and the fat lady hippo that looked sort of hot, if you squinted your eyes a bit. Iron Man was fifteen minutes away from finishing up. It was the other one Big Vern had forgotten to load into the second projector that afternoon.
He bounded up the steps – also constructed of cinderblocks – and ducked inside. The inside was stuffy and stank of sweat, cigarette smoke, and unwashed laundry. Billy Bud went to the kitchenette table. Dirty dishes, ashtrays, and empty Bud cans littered its surface… but no flat, plastic case containing the two reels of Madagascar 2. “Damn,” muttered Billy Bud. “Where in tarnation it?”
He looked all over the place, but it was nowhere to be found. If he’d actually thought for a moment and looked under the table, he would have found that it had slipped off the edge and joined bread crumbs and fossilized macaroni-and-cheese noodles on the dusty formica floor.
“Billy Bud!” yelled his father from the direction of the concession stand. “Get that movie and get your ass back to the booth! It’s almost intermission time!”
That was when Billy Bud did what he did best… he panicked. He knew if he didn’t have something, anything, on Projector Number Two when the last-call-for-refreshment bell was rang, Big Vern would tan his hide. True, Billy Bud was middle-aged himself, but that wouldn’t stop his daddy none.
In desperation, he left the trailer and went to the shack out back. Inside, he pulled a ceiling chain and a sixty-watt bulb snapped on. The shed was where Big Vern kept all his old movies. Not the new releases he rented every two weeks, but the ones he had bought and played back during the sixties and seventies, when the Drive-In was at its heyday. One set of shelves held old horror and science-fiction films like Night of the Iguana Man, Grandson of the Iguana Man, Killer Gnats, and Booger-Eating Zombies from Planet 69. A second set of shelves held Big Vern’s exploitation films – the ones Billy Bud’s mother didn’t care much for. Movies like Big Boobed Biker Babes, Prison Pussy Party, and Billy
Bud’s personal favorite, I Was A Teen-Aged Meth-Whore.
But none of those would do tonight. There were alot of families on Friday nights, with a ton of kids. Staple Gun 5 or Bad Girls With Bullwhips wouldn’t be appropriate.
“Billy Bud… where the hell are you, boy?” Big Vern’s voice sounded mad enough to chew nails and shit thumbtacks.
On top of an old Frigidaire was a wooden crate full of old cartoons. Droopy Dawg, Popeye the Sailor Man, Heckle & Jeckle. Billy Bud loved Heckle & Jeckle, but Big Vern didn’t. He said they were just a couple of smart-ass birds, up to no good.
Billy Bud got down the crate, digging through it, looking for something he could play that wouldn’t offend anybody, least of all his daddy. When he got to the bottom of the crate, he found a black metal reel that he’d never laid eyes on before. A strip of masking tape in the center read: Black Mass, July 16, 2008.
“BILLY BUD!” Big Vern’s voice carried across the drive-in lot like the wrath of God. “Get back here with that movie… PRONTO!”
When Big Vern said “pronto” it was like the warden of death row asking “What would you like to order for your last meal? Fried chicken or meatloaf?”
“Aw… shit!” Billy Bud picked up the black reel, tucked it under his arm, and headed back to his post.
On his way, he saw that the ending credits of Iron Man were almost finished and folks were leaving their cars and trucks and gravitating toward the concession stand for Round Two of watered-down cold drinks and artery-clogging chili-cheese-fries. Billy Bud bounded up the steps to the projection booth and slammed the door. As Projector One wound down, he popped the black reel on the spindles of Projector Two and pushed the Auto-Thread button. Big Vern had paid a pretty penny for the two high-tech projectors, both of them Super-Adapt 5000’s. They would take any millimeter film, from 8mm to the kind today’s movies were printed on. The one on the black reel was a 16 mm, but the Super-Adapt worked like a pro, the spindles shifting inward, converging, and threading the slotted celluloid with no hassle at all. True, his father had paid $25,000 for
the pair of them, while their septic tank was so backed up that they had to take a piss through a hole Vern had cut in the floor… but his father had assured them that it was an investment that simply couldn’t be passed up.
As Billy Bud let Projector Two prepare itself for showtime, he looked out one of the projection holes that had been cut in the cinderblock wall. Directly in front of him, was parked the Baxters’ red Dodge dually. Usually, Greg and Thelma Baxter were sound asleep in the cab by the second feature, while their twin boys, Jimmy Jack and Johnny Joe lay, on their bellies, atop the truck’s extended roof. The two ten-year-olds were there now, already decked out in their pajamas; Incredible Hulk for one and WWE Wrestling for the other.
Down below, he could hear his father at the concession stand register, hee-hawing loudly. Billy Bud frowned. The old man was probably flirting with Rhonda Sue Hickey, who did hair over at the Clip & Curl. Big Vern was always coming on to the girl, who was 29 to his 62, and showed his lust openly and unashamedly, before sending her on way with her grilled cheese sandwich, onion rings, and Diet Fresca. Billy Bud’s mother endured her husband’s indiscretion with a grain of salt, to busy flipping foot longs and black angus patties on the grill in back to scold him.
Most of the men were standing in line, shooting the shit, ready to order beer. Big Vern carried Miller Genuine Draft, Bud, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. And he kept Zima on ice for those two old queers who ran the used bookstore in town. After they’d had a few Zimas behind their belt, they’d retire to the back of their VW van, causing it to squeak and creak like two Rock-em Sock-em Robots making love.
After the last-call bell rang, the second feature was ready to begin. Well, it ain’t what the doctor ordered, thought Billy Bud, “but here goes.”
He snapped on the auto-play switch and the film began to roll.
There was no title and no sign of credits. The picture on the big sixty foot screen was blurry at first, then came sharply into focus. The scene was at night, but the flickering glow of patio tiki torches gave off enough light to reveal what was going on. Billy Bud Recognized the spot right away. It was Shelter #14 over at Hickory Springs State Park. It was the same exact place the Grandstaffs had held their annual family reunion last May.
But the event that was playing out on the screen wasn’t no family reunion… not by a long shot.
There were maybe twenty-five or thirty people standing around the shelter in long, black robes. They wore rubber Halloween masks and held long black candles. Billy Bud studied the masked figures. There was Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and there were celebrities, too. Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, even Elvis.
The camera panned to the right as the procession of robed folks congregated between two maple trees. Trussed up with clothesline and hung up overhead was a bluetick coonhound, confused and whimpering pitifully.
“Hey, ain’t that Luke Branson’s dog, Ol’ Blue?” asked Jimmy Jack.
“I thought he got run over by a tractor-trailer on the interstate a while back,” replied Johnny Joe.
The scene continued, getting weirder by the moment. The people in the long, black robes suddenly stripped down to nothing.
“Lordy Mercy!” said Johnny Joe. “Them folks are plumb buck nekid!”
His brother nodded. “As the proverbial jaybird, I’d say.”
Marilyn, a young woman, and Nixon, a much older man, stepped beneath Ol’ Blue’s squirming form. A man wearing a George Bush mask held a long butcher knife over his head, then slit the poor pooch open from breastbone to balls. Marilyn and Nixon stood beneath a shower of dog blood, rubbing it all over themselves with great abandon.
Luke Branson jumped out of his Ford pickup a few rows up ahead. He looked m
ore than a mite disturbed. He began to march past the other cars, fists balled into angry white knots, heading toward the concession stand.
Billy Bud turned his eyes back to the screen. The other naked folks were catching the remaining torrent of Ol’ Blue’s life’s blood in big styrofoam cups with BIG VERN’S DRIVE-IN THEATRE printed on the side. They were the 48 ounce size – Vern’s Super Slurp Special – so they held quite a lot.
Some of the drive-in patrons had begun to leave their cars now. Some seemed bumfuzzled by the whole thing. Others seemed outraged, and others seemed… well, they seemed downright embarrassed. The looks on their faces revealed that they weren’t necessarily bothered by the gore or indecency of the scene that unfolded… but more by the familiarity of it all. Some started toward the concession stand, while others jumped back into their cars and revved up their engines.
The scene on the screen had taken a turn for the worse. Nixon was behind Marilyn now, humping up against her ass, rubbing his hands all over her blood-slickened skin. She had two large brass rings dangling from her nipples. Nixon reached around, hooked his knuckles in the rings, and gave them a hearty yank.
“Ouch!” said Jimmy Jack. “I bet that smarted!”
“Like King Kong’s hangnail,” countered Johnny Joe. Both boys grinned, amazed at how far human skin could actually stretch.
Suddenly, Big Vern was standing in the gravel lane down below, shaking his fist in the air. “What the shit have you done, Billy Bud?” His nose was bloody and out of alignment, where Luke Branson had nailed him. “Turn that crap off… NOW!”
Enthralled, Billy Bud continued to watch the movie. “Hey, Daddy… that feller in the Nixon mask has a gall bladder scar alot like yours. Just like yours, to tell the truth.”
Big Vern did a little dance of rage in the gravel. “I said shut that thing off… PRONTO!”
His father had said the word to end all words, but Billy Bud ignored him. Even in the face of his elder, he adhered to the Number One Rule of Drive-In Projection Maintenance and Operation. His father’s stern command was etched into his brain, never to be banished. “Son, always remember… no matter what…whether it rains or snows, whether a Tennessee tornado rips through sucking earth or Lord Jesus comes back riding a winged Pegasus with the heavenly trumpets a-blaring… never… I repeat, NEVER…turn that projector off in the middle of a showing.”
