by Alan Spencer
Cherry filling had been stuffed into the man’s torso. The baker was dicing pieces of fingers, like vegetables for stew. He added the pieces to the cherry filling, then spread the flattened flesh over the man’s exposed belly and stitched it in place.
“Nothing’s more satisfying than filling a pie,” the baker announced, acknowledging Ted's presence. “It’s my favorite food on earth. You know, everyone should put themselves into their work.”
The baker lifted the large corpse in his arms with an audible struggle and inserted him into what looked to be a pizza oven. “Good God, he's heavy! He’ll cook at four hundred and fifty degrees. You’ll want a slice while it’s still warm. It's best warm.”
“Um…y-yes, please. I’d like that a lot. I love dessert. It’s my favorite food on earth too.”
"You want a dollop of ice cream on top?”
“Even better.”
The baker used a can opener on a container of apple filling. “I’m working the late shift, friend. People need their pies baked fresh daily. It’s all about the filling. It's a lot of work, though. That’s why I’m glad you’re here. I’ll pay a decent wage for a strong back. You’re it, if you want the job.”
“I, I’m your guy.” Ted’s heart fluttered in his chest. He was pouring sweat; the room was an oven itself. Staring at the blood and guts strewn about the room, he swore to never eat a pie again. “You say jump, I'll say how high.”
He scanned the room for Vickers. They guy was nowhere to be seen. Damn it, I’m on the spot here. Do something quick, Detective.
The baker rolled out a rack on wheels. Naked bodies were suspended on it from meat hooks driven between their shoulder blades. The limp white corpses shuffled as they were moved. It struck him that this was all too real. The baker could turn on him any moment, and he’d be the guy inserted into an oven at four hundred and fifty degrees.
“I want you to remove their guts.” The baker offered him a cleaver. “Those aren’t good for the palate. Shit and digested food, that’s a culinary no-no. The flesh and blood and muscle tissue, though, is the perfect recipe for my pies. Delicious!”
Ted couldn’t take the first step. He refused. He wasn’t going to disembowel anybody dead or alive. Vickers could go to hell.
And where the hell is he?
Damn it, did he leave me?
He did, didn’t he?
I'm alone with this psychotic baker.
“Oh, I get it.” The baker smiled, his eyes meeting Ted's. “You wanted to fill my pies, didn't you? One day you will. Any apprentice needs incentive. Let me apologize for not explaining the way I do things. I worked years gutting corpses for the benefit of my father’s pies. He never gave me the chance to fill his desserts with their delectable pieces. That’s why I shoved him into the oven. Mother and I ate him up. His flesh was a tad bitter, but the filling was just right. Eyes, tongue, fingers, flesh, it’s salty and sweet and mmmmmmm good.”
His eyes bulged, and he tilted his head to the side. “Did you hear that? I heard something.”
Ted was startled at the direct question. “No. What? What did you hear?”
The baker patted his stomach. “My stomach’s growling. I saved myself for dinner. Let me hear your belly.”
Ted stiffened. The baker was already approaching him, eyes jubilant. Then his face creased in a scowl. The sudden change of expression was terrifying. The baker wrapped his arms around Ted’s back and pressed his ear up to his belly. “Oh, I heard your belly growl. You’re as hungry as I am. Nobody can work on an empty stomach. Let’s eat!”
I am going to kick your ass, Vickers.
The room turned. The bodies on the pole dripped blood. They jerked in spasms, or so he thought. Ted was losing it. The heat in the room caused mirages. The ovens flickered bright with fires. The smell was turning his stomach. He spat thick saliva from his mouth.
The baker removed a sizzling, cooked body from one of the five ovens. A young woman smoked, her body unrecognizable beyond its slender shape. Her eyes, mouth and nose had been sliced clean off. The baker used thick gloves to place her on a different table. He used a machete to slice her belly into eight equal pieces. He served a dollop of the mess onto an aluminum plate.
“You get first taste, newbie.”
Ted was a split-second from running—Vickers could go straight to hell!—when a shadow side-tackled the baker. Vickers lifted the man into the oven and slammed it shut. “COOK, YOU FUNNY-LOOKING BASTARD!”
Ted and Vickers pushed against the door to keep it closed. The baker pleaded for his life, and then his words turned into disheartening laughter. “You can’t kill me, you fools! Cook me to your liking, I’ll come back. You can’t kill the dead. I’ll come back as something else, something much worse! We only get stronger with each person we kill.”
Vickers turned up the heat to five hundred degrees. “If it’s all the same, I’m cooking you well done.”
“I told you they were ghosts,” Ted exploded. “They play the part of evil characters because it’s fun for them. The psychotics get off on it. They’ve brooded in the afterlife for so long, they’ve plotted and planned and mapped out our demise, and this is what they’ve decided to finally do to us.”
The punching against the oven door slowed until it ceased altogether. Ted sighed in relief. Vickers released the oven. “He has to be dead.”
Ted knew it wasn’t true. “Like he said, he’ll come back as something else.”
“But he’s managed to kill over a dozen innocent people.” Vickers stared solemnly about the room and the leftovers of violence. “It’s disgusting. Everything about this situation is fucking impossible.”
Ted joined Vickers in turning off every oven except the one where the baker continued to blacken.
“I’m responsible for this,” Ted lamented. Guilt and blame surged into his voice. The dead bodies. The butchering. “If I hadn’t played the reel again, none of this would’ve happened. People would still be alive.”
Vickers patted his back. “I remember when I interrogated you back in Iowa. You were horrified. You wanted your horror movies back, that's it. And I talked to Dennis Brauman. He might hide behind that defender of public morals shield, but deep down, he probably looks at porn and watches rated R movies all the same. He stole your property, and you simply wanted it back. You didn’t know this would be the result. Nobody could.”
“I carried a shotgun with me when I played the first reel,” Ted continued his confession. “I was so naïve. I thought I could stop them if they came back. I really believed they wouldn’t. It’s so ridiculous, every detail of it.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” Vickers insisted. “Your intentions weren’t to bring them back or for anybody to die. But now we have to torch your apartment building. Act on your better judgment now. Help me. I trust you’ll do the right thing.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Ted stormed about the room searching for flammables. “Hey, what happened to that shotgun you used up in the apartment?”
“I threw it at them before crawling the hell out of that place.”
“Forget it then,” Ted said, obviously disappointed. “At least you still have a handgun.”
Vickers joined in the search. The garage was a kitchen in every respect now, the transition complete. Ted spotted three bottles of cooking sherry. “Perfect.”
Vickers removed a lighter from his pocket. “All we need are some rags to stuff these with, and presto, fire starters.”
Ted bent down to the pile of clothes stripped from the victims. He tore a shirt in three large pieces. Together, they wet the scraps and stuffed them into the bottles. Vickers moved to the window facing the apartment. “Are you ready for this?”
He wasn't sure, but he said anyway, “Start a fire on the bottom floor, and it’ll eventually spread to the top. Easy. Cinch.”
Vickers raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, a cinch.”
They waited by the window in indecision. Vickers shook hands with Ted. “If we don’
t make it, it was nice knowing you.”
“We make a good team,” Ted said. “Thank you for what you said to me earlier. Trying to reassure me and everything.”
“What I said was true, buddy. Believe me, I’m not that nice. Take my word for it.”
Ted undid the chains at the door and quietly opened the garage door. “You first, Detective.”
The charred body of Mr. Baker forced its way out of the oven. Blackened and smoking, he returned to the rack of hanging bodies to begin work on his next pie.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jessica halted at the second-floor fire exit door, standing in the stairway. A group of telemarketers bumbled about the stairs in confusion. Many were streaked in blood, their faces frozen in horror and agony. Jessica attempted to warn them that the man who called himself “The Intestinator” was right behind her, but the words were crammed back into her mouth when an explosion tore off the door leading to TeleCorp Marketing Solutions.
Jessica screamed and doubled back. Her eardrums rang. Blood dripped from the ceiling and walls and spread on the floor. Ten people in business suits were served a dose of death in macabre fashion. Telemarketer Judy Temple’s throat had been stabbed by a jaw. Severed fingers were jammed into Harry Milner’s eye sockets. Mark Alanson’s throat had been wrapped with intestines, and he was strangled to death. Jessica shut her eyes and turned her back to the carnage, knowing so many others had suffered similar crazy fates. That’s when the shuffling of the corpses began. They jerked. Twitched. Coughed. The skeletons beneath their skin shifted free, breaking through in wild tearing fashion, and flew back through the nearest doorway, magnetized by an unknown force.
What in hell…?
She refused to cross the heap of death that blocked the landing. Instead she turned and charged back up one floor. The Intestinator hadn’t shown up yet.
Dr. Schuler’s Dentistry office was her only option for cover. The Intestinator’s slow approach could be heard from the floor above her. Whump. Whump. Whump.
“MY GUTS CRAVE YOU!” Then a sobbing voice punctuated the threat. “I can’t stop them. My insides are out of my control. Run—hide! I’m so sorry! I never wanted any of this to happen!”
Jessica slammed the clouded glass door and turned the bolt. Next, she propped a chair beneath the knob and stacked all the chairs in the waiting room against the door. She formed a barricade out of shelves, a coffee table and a desk. Out of breath and frazzled, she checked her body for blood and discovered she was drenched in the aftermath of what had happened thirty seconds ago.
He can’t be real.
People’s intestines can’t attack people. Pieces of body parts can't kill people. She thought back to the jaw bone stuck in Judy's throat. Christ, what’s next?
Jessica’s chest burned, her heart pumping. This was fear. Survival instinct was supposed to kick in, she thought. Her senses were supposed to sharpen. Yet it didn't occur. Panic and sweat in her eyes, she shivered and stood nailed in place, waiting for the stranger outside to arrive at the door without.
The wide shadow on the fogged glass was distorted. The shape was featureless and so evil, she thought. Jessica expected the man to pound or smash through the glass barrier. Instead, the chairs shifted. The lock broke and the door opened just an inch. Through the legs of the desk and around the file towers, the pink rope projection slithered. The end was an open mouth. The mouth like a sucker fish.
Jessica slipped on all fours and crawled like a dog to the nearest room. She kicked the door shut behind her. She was in the dentist’s office: the chair, the hovering light overhead and the cabinets seemed so high from where she crouched on the floor. The length of intestine slammed against the bottom of the door, attempting to slither through. Jessica turned on the dentist chair’s light rather than venture closer to the door for the light switch.
The door cracked. The intestine kept battering against the wood. Soon, it would pry its way inside.
“Leave me alone,” she cried. Jessica didn’t know what else to say. “I’m a good person. I’m only a paralegal, for God’s sake! It’s not like I’m a lawyer for murderers and pedophiles!”
An intestine should be the last thing to judge me.
The door’s crack splintered further, opening wider until it finally burst open. The intestine twisted and snaked through. Jessica returned to her feet. She was up against the back wall. In seconds, the intestine would wrap around her neck like her co-worker's and perhaps snap her head off too. She searched frantically through the cabinets for anything to defend herself with.
The intestine circled the chair. It circled her left foot and tightened its hold on her ankle. Jessica removed her other pump and beat the intestine with the sharp heel. The intestine was too slimy for the shoe to cause damage.
“Let go of me!”
Jessica couldn’t believe it. She was pleading with an intestine.
She stamped and kicked at the creature to no success. She dug into the shelves for a weapon—anything. The first item she located was a steel container of Novocain. She twisted off the lid, but the Novocain slipped from her hands. It landed close to the intestine and the pink rope drew back.
“You don’t like that, huh?” Jessica smeared the liquid on her fingers and slathered it onto the retreating innards. “You’re scared now, huh? You don’t want to judge me so much anymore? Fuck you! FUCK YOU!”
The intestine curled and tensed and writhed to flick the liquid from its outer layer. The coil sizzled, and burned, and started to steam. The intestine wound itself back through the door, shot out of the waiting room, and wriggled through the barricade. Jessica waited. Stomps marked the Intestinator’s retreat.
She rubbed her ankle where it had been squeezed. She imagined what it would feel like if the coil had tightened around her neck. Jessica hugged herself to abate the shudder. She was cold and attacked by gooseflesh. Her thoughts went from boiling to a simmer. Billy was on his way to the building. She would be safe. He'd take her away from this nightmare.
“Oh no.” She clenched her fists. “NO—he’s heading right into the building. He's out there in harm's way.”
Jessica scavenged through Dr. Schuler’s office for a phone. The only one she spotted was behind the counter, tipped over onto the floor. She had to step over a receptionist’s body. The poor woman was in her sixties, her face and neck riddled with gouges, another victim of an unknown murderer.
Jessica was relieved there was a dial tone. She dialed Billy’s cell phone number. It rang and rang, but no answer. She left a distressed message. “Don’t go into the building. It’s dangerous. There’s,” she paused, at a loss for an explanation, “a killer in the building. Be careful, wherever you are. I’m going to call for help. Stay safe, Billy, I mean it. I love you. I—just be safe!”
She hung up the phone.
Her imagination wandered from one extreme to the other: Billy was dead, Billy was injured, Billy was trapped. Brooding over the possibilities, she dialed 9-1-1. The line was busy. The event in Corporate Tower was happening everywhere, she thought. She kept dialing, waiting for a ring tone. She bent the drawn shades of a nearby window and peered outside. The dome over the city served to create permanent night in Chicago. Jessica caught moving shapes through the shadows. Flying objects with wings. Red eyes burning as bright as road flares. The eyes seemed to drip, they burned so fiercely.
Another sight, she disbelieved from the onset.
“No way in hell,” Jessica declared. “This is as unbelievable as attacking intestines!”
A voice inside her assured her that, in fact, what she was seeing was very real.
A living pillar, a walking skyscraper, a breathing, strutting, giant woman shuffled between buildings. She kicked and punched at skyscrapers. The rumble was distant, but Jessica felt the aftershocks.
She better not come this way.
Please don't come this way!
The woman was heading north, though taking frequent stops to pummel buildings. She st
amped the ground and grounded her heel into the earth in random fits of anger.
“What is that bitch doing?—and why is she dressed like a hooker?”
She guessed the woman was over two hundred feet tall and wore a mean pair of red leather stilettos. Pink fishnets hugged her legs. She wore a g-string. A tube top housed generous breasts that seemed to want to burst from the thin silken fabric. The woman’s hair waved wildly and electric red in the wind. She squeezed a man in her hand. Blood spilled through the cracks of her fingers. The giant hooker released the pulped corpse, who plummeted many stories to splat on the street.
Jessica turned from the window. She slipped down the wall in shock. Nobody was here to save her. Billy was in triple the danger that she was, being out in the city.
The best thing for you is to stay put. Billy is out there. He’s smart. His dad used to be a cop. Billy has street smarts. He knows the roads and the city as well as any Chicagoan. Wait here. You're as safe as you can be.
“Unless that bitch punches through this building…” slipped from her lips.
She pictured Billy squeezed between the giant’s fingers.
She heard something talking, and she realized she'd left the phone off the hook. It was the police line. Listening to the recorded message, Jessica’s body went rigid. She wept because there was nothing else she could do. She curled up in a ball on the floor, hand numb and knuckles white from clutching the phone so hard.
“Citizens of Chicago, stay in shelter. Do not attempt to leave your homes. The situation is being assessed by the United States military. If you’re in danger, please use any means to defend yourself. The Chicago Police Department will do what they can to protect its citizens, but due to extenuating circumstances, we cannot answer calls. Martial law has been enacted for the duration. Again, stay in your homes or any shelter you can find. Defend yourselves with whatever you can and stay in groups. The situation is being handled as expediently as possible.”
The automated message repeated.
“Nobody’s out there to help us,” Jessica whispered. “I’m alone.”
