by Alan Spencer
“I’m taking the longest shower after this is over," she said.
Dr. Aorta giggled—two high-pitched snorts. “Prissy thing, if we’re going to survive, you're going to get your hands even dirtier.”
“Oh, fuck off. I’ve had intestines touch me, I’ve seen my co-workers massacred, and I almost drowned in blood. I'm about as nasty as a lady can get.”
Billy squeezed her arm. “Let’s just get to the address.”
“I lost the paper,” Dr. Aorta said matter-of-factly. Then he smiled that astute, inside-joke smile. “Oh, but I memorized it.”
Billy asked, "So how are we going to get there?”
Dr. Aorta pointed up the street next to Star Coffee. “That’s my baby. It’s a GTK Boxer. I just call it ’The Boxer’.”
Billy eyed the war machine. Camouflage painted the modular armor. It had eight large wheels. It was like a tank without the turret. Maybe a steroid-injected Hummer, Billy thought.
“German engineering at its finest,” Dr. Aorta bragged. “It has a 40mm automatic grenade launcher sticking out the front and an MG3 machine gun. Baby runs on diesel. This will mow down whatever’s in our way and protect us from their evil.”
The street shifted, literally rocked on its foundation. Three streetlights tilted and crashed from the concussion. Car alarms went off. The breaking of rubble, the grinding of rocks, and a deafening sigh of pain, “UHNNNNNNNNNN…”
“Now what?” Billy shouted. “What else is there? Trolls with laser guns?”
Down the street, the back of the five hundred-foot hooker rose from the street. She lifted herself up again from the subway and dominated the street. Blood trickled down her face. From her eye down to her jaw the flesh was jagged and serrated. She swung her fist down at them, but she was only semi-conscious and missed. Billy and Jessica were forced to back-pedal from the vehicle, but Nelson and Dr. Aorta found safety within the Boxer.
Nelson stuck his head out of the top hatch. “Hurry up, guys, before she swings again!”
Dr. Aorta took the helm, Billy assumed, because the vehicle coughed out a black jet of exhaust and sped from the scene. Nelson shouted down into the vehicle, “What the hell are you doing? You’re leaving them! Guys, run—watch out!”
Ssssssssssssssssonk!
With a flash of orange and an ear-shattering boom, the grenade launcher issued its first round. It struck the woman at her shoulder. Bone, blood and flesh disintegrated. The damage rained down onto the city in thickening clops. The g-stringed titan raged, screamed and threw her head back. She stamped her stilettos and shook the earth, causing the vehicle to side-wheel.
“That guy’s going to get Nelson killed,” Billy huffed. “I shouldn’t have trusted that war monger. This is all out of control!”
Out from the alleys, they arrived. Men and women with their heads split down the middle, teeth clacking together, the Venus flytrap monsters hungry for brains.
“Run!” Billy pulled Jessica from the alley. Dozens pursued them, pouring out of apartments, wrecked buildings and gutters. “Into the subway, quick!”
They rushed down the steps and into the subway. They raced down each stair, Billy catching Jessica from falling forward when she turned her ankle on one of the steps. They reached the end of the stairs and prayed the subway was clear of enemies.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ted forced himself to stop drinking after reeling from five back-to-back shots of whiskey. He couldn’t focus, his mind a sinkhole full of shit. Nobody knew he was in the bar, though every now and then new screams carried into the night. Ted figured there weren’t many people left to die. He was safe for now, he consoled himself. There's nothing else he could do for anyone. He tried his best, and with that consolation, he sat alone at a booth opposite a dart board and a Terminator pinball machine. He stared at the beer poster of three women clad in bikinis floating on inflatable rafts on a lagoon-like pool. Ted dreamed of swimming with the brunette and the blonde, sandwiched between them, and staying tipsy.
“The closest you’re going to get to that is with your vampire women.” He laughed hysterically. “I should’ve called the movie Naked Graveyard Vampires Find Orgasms in Dildo Cemetery. I can’t believe I had sex with them. Un-be-fucking-lievable. They’re ghosts. They’re dead. But it's the best sex I've ever had! Ah-hah-hah-hah!”
The silence that followed was haunting. He grew paranoid. Uncertain. He regretted drinking. The room tilted. He had to swim upstream to form complete thoughts. The image of Detective Vickers’ head sliced from the neck by a schoolgirl replayed in his mind. That could’ve been him. Should’ve been him.
Why didn’t the slasher girls kill me? I’m not that fast. They could see where I was running. I didn’t out-maneuver them.
He scrambled across the room and tried the phone. The phone lines were down. How many people were still alive in the city? Was he one of the few remaining, if not the only one period?
The room was rocked by tremors. Huge footsteps.
FWOMP! FWOMP! FWOMP!
Bottles were jarred from the shelf and shattered.
He peeked through the curtain.
FWOMP! FWOMP! FWOMP!
The concussions grew in intensity. The five hundred-foot woman passed the bar, pursuing something, her steps quick, precise and undeterred by her surroundings. Her breasts jiggled, her stilettos keeping her at a jog. He recalled the ending of the film where she was blown up by jet fighters. The end shot was a fake city being drenched in blood.
Ted pulled away from the curtain. The determination to sneak into the apartment hadn’t vanished, but it was weakened by the improbability of survival. You won’t survive in here for very much longer, either. I won’t die in a fucking bar.
He slammed his fist onto the tabletop in frustration. He couldn't think clearly enough to decide what to do next.
Then someone asked him, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
Ted shot his gaze to the bar. There he was, walking death himself. He should’ve known before the first word touched his ear. The smell. The embalming fluid.
The Pickler.
“I created you,” Ted snarled. “Just leave me the hell alone, and I’ll leave you the hell alone.”
The Pickler drip-drip-dripped between words. His features, his skin, underneath his fingernails, from his eyes, they all exuded chemicals. The Pickler was more deathlike now than in the movie, Ted observed, his cheekbones sunken and his eyes a faded olive color and his skin eel-gray.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” he asked again.
“I—”
Ted stopped himself. The question was familiar. It was a line of dialogue from the script he wrote. He crafted his response carefully. “You only live once. Death is the final ride.”
“Yes,” the corpse replied in a low drool. “That’s why I carve the dead for their insides, for their organs. I steal from the dead to give to the living. The dead should be liquidized wholesale. And the no-pulsers, it should be a prerequisite for the grave to give up their parts. Surgeons should be stationed at morgues to take what's needed.”
“You’re doing a public service selling body parts,” Ted said in encouragement. “The dead don’t use them, the greedy pus heads. Selfish assholes.”
The Pickler was disappointed Ted didn’t play along correctly. He tried again anyway. “You don’t need consent to borrow from the dead. Even your sister’s body, Ted, I surgically removed her heart. Somebody else could use it. She’s dead and rotting, what does she care?”
Ted stood up from his chair.
That wasn’t in the script.
Trisha’s been dead for three years.
“If you know so much about her, then how did she die?”
The Pickler smiled, the trickle of embalming fluid audible. “She was held at knifepoint for her purse. In New York, she was in the subway alone. The robber decided to have some fun with her, and—”
Ted hurled a stool at the villain. The corpse was fast and ducked to avoid it
.
“Stripped her naked—”
“SHUT UP!”
Ted delivered another stool across the room, but his aim was off, the tears in his eyes blurrng his vision.
“Told her he’d slit her throat if she screamed—”
“Another word from you, and I’ll send you to hell!”
“You said so yourself, there is no afterlife. Death is the final ride, and you’re about to be strapped in!”
He rushed for the door, but Ted stopped at the table next to him. The ashtray was full of stubbed-out menthol cigarettes. The Zippo lighter next to the ashtray beckoned him. Embalming fluid formed a puddle around the walking corpse, the dripping still at a constant.
“Death is the final ride,” Ted shouted, picking up the Zippo and flicking it. “And it's sending you right to hell!”
He lit the floor.
Blue flames puckered and trailed toward the corpse in shark-fin arcs. The Pickler was instantly engulfed. His skin crackled, sparks flying as they popped and burst. His eye sockets exploded in pops. His flesh smoldered, every layer of embalming fluid ignited within him. The bar was clogged with the choking stench of burning flesh and caustic fluids.
Ted pushed open the door and sucked in breaths of air, though it was stale.
Thinning.
That dome is going to snuff us all.
The bar was lit from within, the firelight dancing strong. The night was a yellow, orange and red blaze as the corpse continued to pursue him. “I’ll never die,” he gargled and coughed. “I’ll just keep burning.”
Bright lights shined, like two monster eyes. Ted heard the growl of pistons churning and an engine sputtering smoke as the rig closed in on him. With the roll of steel against pavement, the steam roller barreled toward him.
What else is coming out of the jungle tonight?
Ba-bam!
Sparks shot from the curb next to his feet. The driver was shooting at him. Ted sprinted up the street. He caught the slasher girls guarding his apartment building, blithely picking their nails with the tips of daggers and axes, and sharing giddy schoolgirl conversation. “I shoved that rod up his ass, and afterwards, he didn’t want to try anal sex on me ever again…”
“Figures,” a slasher girl laughed. “After I cut off his balls and stomped them into the ground, he no longer wanted my number after the party. Men are strange creatures. I really thought he liked me.”
Ted disregarded the troubling conversation when the rig revved its engine, the spotlight touching him again. He dove behind a stack of garbage cans. Ba-bam! A cannon blasted, ear-drum shatteringly loud. Garbage lids shot up with wild ping sounds. Ted crawled for better cover, soon getting up and racing between two buildings, up another street, and retreating into a residential neighborhood. The houses were boarded up from within. He screamed and begged for help. Not even a porch light flickered on in response.
The steam roller was nowhere in sight.
He imagined being flattened into the street, every bone snapped, every inch of him pulped. The only beacon of salvation was up ahead, a lone standing grocery store, a Piggly Wiggly. Ted rounded to the side of the building where an F-150 truck was parked. The driver was half out of the driver’s seat, hanging limply. His skull was hollow, a hole at the top where his brains had been sucked out.
The truck's keys were in the ignition.
Ted checked the back door into the store. It was partly open. He had access to the goods inside, he realized. Looking back to the truck, he knew he couldn’t actually escape the city. Chicago was under a skull dome prison. He was trapped here unless he changed the situation. He had to play by the rules of the ghosts who possessed the projector.
With the truck and a few creatively picked supplies, he believed he had a chance to re-enter the apartment and destroy the projector.
But first, he had much work to do…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Father Richard Malone hid in the confessional. Fifty people had found shelter in Saint Anna Catholic Church, but nobody knew he was inside the booth. Many were members of the congregation, and they were doing fine, he thought, muttering prayers on their own. The windows were blockaded by stacks of pews. Some people were huddled up and studying the outside through the small openings. What he was hiding from was terrifying, and it could still be waiting outside for him.
His fear was the schoolgirl wearing a simple plaid miniskirt. She was maybe seventeen. There were dozens of them, but only one had tracked him through the garden in the back of the church and pursued him.
“Don’t you remember me?” the schoolgirl called out to him. “I’m Cathy Higgins.”
The name Cathy Higgins tightened his spine. That cold sticky sweat of guilt gave him a slimy feeling. A horrible caught sensation itched at him. Nobody knew about Cathy Higgins, and that schoolgirl wasn’t Cathy Higgins.
How did she know about Cathy Higgins?
“You said you’d stay with me,” the schoolgirl posing as Cathy Higgins had said to him. “I put out for you. I wanted to give myself to you. I want you, Richie. Let me have you. Every bit of you. Bend me over. Show me the Holy Spirit. I want it inside me!”
He’d demanded, “How do you know about Cathy Higgins?”
Cathy was a sweet girl, a congregation member, who’d fallen in love with him. She'd meet him in confession. He never had sex with her, but she masturbated during confession, and the worst part of it was, he watched her and enjoyed every moment of it. The memory of it sickened him. Disgusted him.
He kept running from the girl who knew about Cathy Higgins. She raised a blade and kept chasing him. “I can show you pleasure, Richie. The knife will set you free from your manhood. No more machismo bullshit. No more lust. You’ll have your God and your church. Isn’t that what matters to you most? Without your dick in the way, you’ll hand yourself over to God completely. You’ll get it back in heaven, I promise.”
He lost the girl when he ran into the church and locked the door behind him. That's when he'd hidden in the confessional booth.
“My brothers and sisters…” Words seeped through the cracks of the confessional booth, and he listened. “…you are safe here. This is God’s haven. Nothing can harm you in His kingdom. This is judgment day. The day of reckoning is upon us. I am his judge. I will deem who is fit to walk in heaven or just to crawl the wretched burning fields of hell. Now I must remove your soul to know this, but I promise after I’m finished, I’ll put it right back.”
A hushed silence descended on the church. Richard peeked through the crack of the door. The preacher at the podium was a stranger. He was dressed in a black cassock. His brow bent in a sharp V, eyes shark black as he studied each person in the church.
Who does he think he is?
He’s not a man of the cloth.
“NOW IS THE TIME FOR YOUR JUDGMENT!”
Up from the floorboards burst a rolling platform holding a U-shaped metal device. It crackled and flashed blue and white lightning and fired electromagnetic currents. The false priest was behind the device, static electricity raising the hairs on his arms and head. Shocked, Richard was nailed in place. He watched in helpless denial. The currents pierced scrambling, shrieking bodies. Many attempted to undo the barricade and crawl through the windows. Those who did crawl through immediately received an axe to the head from outside. The group of ravaging schoolgirls attacked, relishing the blood they reaped. Giddy laughter and sing-song voices entered the church:
“Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man, how many heads can we reap?”
The moment the electromagnetic light would touch a body, the flesh split down the middle, and the skeleton was wrenched free, parting and splitting muscle and skin. The skeleton flew onto the giant magnet. The bones crashed against it, breaking into brittle pieces. “YOU’RE GOING TO HELL! AND SO ARE YOU, MA’AM. SONNY, IT’S TOO LATE TO MEET CHRIST. YOU WERE A WHORE WORTHY OF A ROMAN ORGY! YOU’RE DAMNED TO HELL, ALL OF YOU!!! STEP RIGHT UP AND ACCEPT YOUR FATE!”
Few were left alive after minutes of flying skeletons and deflated bodies hitting the floor.
You have to do something. You can’t sit there and watch them die. Face him.
Richard charged out of the booth and tackled the preacher. He caught the man off guard. They crashed to the floor, spun and landed where they shouldn’t have. Neither of them had a chance to escape the electromagnetic rays and the inevitable removal of their bones.
Georgia, the vampire, stood before the wall and watched fifteen minutes of the film entitled Preggers. Anne, the auburn beauty, strutted into the room. “They didn’t kill Ted.”
“That idiot?” Georgia flipped her head back in amusement. “He can’t do anything. He’s a coward. A waste of human skin. He's not a threat to us.”
“What if he comes back and tries to burn the place down again?”
“The slasher girls are outside. The steam roller is driving up and down the streets. That hooker is up and about. The brain faces, are…well, they’re eating brains. Mr. Baker isn’t dead either, though he’s nice and crispy. The Intestinator is nearby. He's not dead either. The Pickler is burning and spreading his death fluid everywhere. And Death Reject isn’t down for the count. They’ve done nothing to stop us.”
“What about Dr. Aorta?”
The name struck a strange chord with her. “Dr. Aorta, who’s he?”
The front door opened. Slasher girl after slasher girl entered with a new corpse in their hands or over their shoulders. Each body suffered head wounds, neck slashes, bodily lacerations and disembowelments. “Hang them in the tub to drain, you lovelies,” Georgia said, welcoming them.
“The tub’s full of blood and spilling over,” the cherry red-haired schoolgirl complained. “And this guy’s fuckin’ heavy.”
Georgia got up and met the schoolgirl. “Then stack them up in the bedroom.” Georgia groped the girl’s buttocks and teased between her legs. Before the slasher girl could react, Georgia bit off her lips, tongue, and wildly drank the blood flowing from the wounds. She bit through the girl’s neck in one chomp, nearly taking out the entire neck. The head bobbed to the side hanging on a single bit of gristle.
