by Alan Spencer
How did I not hear them?
Fear ignited within him. “Helen—Helen, are you okay?”
He raced through the living room to the basement door, which hung wide open. Oh God—oh no! I’m a phony. I’m a fake. I’m sorry. Take me, not her—me, not her!
Dennis sidestepped his fear and entered the basement. The light switch didn’t work, but there were flickering movements of white, blue and red below. He ended up frozen on the last step and craned his head at the disturbing scene before him.
Suddenly the door to the basement was thrown closed and locked.
He gripped the stair rail. Icy sensations encompassed him, and he kept shivering and quaking. He stood in place, horrified and disgusted. Then a venomous female voice, eking out her throat in a slither, spoke to him. “You made a career out of telling people what they couldn’t watch. You censored movies, outright stole property that didn’t belong to you—you and your National Legion of Decency. There’s nothing decent about you, Dennis Brauman. You’re a closet pervert, and there’s nothing worse than a freak in the closet. It means they do bad things in secret.”
Film strips and canisters were spread out on the basement floor. Hundreds of them. The tins glowed a dull silver in the dark. He turned to Helen, to the image playing on the wall, to the profile of a woman hiding in the shadows, and back up to the top of the stairs to the line of light and the shape of feet standing behind the door.
“W-w-what did you do to Helen?” He fell to his knees, and then onto all fours. "What did you do to her?”
The woman in the dark replied, “I offered her the chance to watch your life’s work.”
Dennis crawled through the films, parting them like snow, as he attempted to reach Helen.
“You’re a hypocrite, Mr. Brauman. Now Ted Fuller will have his films back and so much more. We’re packing these up and saving them for later. That’s what life here will be like from now on, a long movie playing out. Movies were always better than life.”
The woman stepped into a patch of light.
He recognized the reptilian woman from one of Ted Fuller’s films.
“You stole those films out of my storage locker, didn’t you?”
The woman’s eyes spat red fiery sparks. “Yeeeeees!”
She lunged at him and seized his neck and jerked it back toward Helen. She was propped in a sitting position on a chair. Her mouth was open wide in fright. The expression was so gnarled and fixed, her death must have happened in a second.
“Oh, but look at the screen—this isn’t a horror movie! Over half the films we found hidden behind that cinder block in the wall beneath the stairs were STAG FILMS! You’ve polished your chubby to the classics.”
Dennis was ashamed, disturbed by what used to be arousing now turned morbid and associated with death.
She seethed through clenched fangs, “You were so fixated on public morals you forgot your own!”
The screen displayed six women on a bed giving each other oral sex, but there they were on the screen, and then there they were in his basement surrounding him. Buxom and young, they strutted to him, petting his hair, lifting off his shirt, playfully unzipping his pants and tugging them down to his knees, while random moans and fake orgasms kept repeating in the background. Helen seemed to watch him, the bright artificial light spilling out the lens animating her pale blue face with life.
Lips kissed down his neck and belly. Dennis was lowered to the mattress on the floor covered from head to toe by nubile, horny women. The vampire woman watched them at work, fascinated, and offered soft words to cheer them on. And finally, the vampire woman said loudly, “You always said there was no difference between porn and horror movies…”
Two of the women clenched Dennis’s neck and broke the spinal cord in one bone-jarring snap.
“…I guess you were right.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ted had witnessed many things in the last fifteen minutes. He used the alley of the blood bank to take cover. He saw three vampires rocket out of his apartment window and fly into the night. One stayed behind, her profile visible in the window.
Why didn't all of them leave?
The slasher girls outside the apartment were armed with various bludgeons and sharp weapons. He counted over sixty of them. They were heading north, but where, he thought. Men and women filed from apartment buildings, businesses, and even the gutters with split-faces, the brains beneath gleaming under the streetlights. He ducked behind a garbage compactor at the burning sight of the Pickler. As he continued to walk, every drop he left behind was a puddle of flaming embalming fluid. Mr. Baker had stolen a Mazda pick-up truck and had loaded it with canned preserves, pounds of sugar, baking sheets, bread rollers and an axe. A steamroller chugged down the street, the man at the helm a skeletal corpse in a hardhat and a reflective orange vest. He also carried a shotgun. Ted had seen the movie before. The man blew the kneecaps off of his victims and flattened them with the steamroller. Then a hulking man with a bulging belly followed him; the hole at his navel widened and shrank as if breathing. The pink viscera would poke out every few seconds issuing drops of blood.
More villains were on their way.
No—not them! Good God, what else is coming?
Men in checkered flannel shirts marched the streets. Thirty of them, by his rough count. The majority were armed with pitchforks, scythes and machetes, but also chicken wire—or more accurately, bale wire. “Flesh Farmers Harvest the Living,” he mouthed. They followed the crowd, each in straw hats, chewing a piece of straw or a wad of tobacco, and eying the landscape for another body to ball up into their human bale.
Death Reject was among them undetected. The sunken corpse couldn’t remove his smile; whatever was transpiring through his head, it defined pleasure in death, pleasure in delivering agony to the living. Ghosts, just as the blonde vampire said at Denton Hall, were inside them, playing out their revenge against the living. A sick feeling washed over him. Overwhelmed with guilt and helplessness, he battled not to vomit.
The cinematic parade wasn’t over yet. Naked bodies were the tail end of their advance. Pregnant women, he realized. Four or five dozen.
“Preggers,” he whispered. “That’s a Howard James movie. If Howard was still alive to see this, he’d shit a brick.”
Their eyes were bright red bulbs, and within the belly, the red bulb light gave shape to an alien life form at the helm. The creature plucked organs, bones and muscle tissue like a puppeteer controlling its puppet. Ted waited until they were four blocks away before starting the truck and pulling up right outside his apartment. Ted ran full-out to hide behind a set of parked cars and waited for the vampire to come out.
It’s just you and me, bitch.
After five long minutes of doubting his plan, Ted saw the window open, and the vampire poked her head out to leer down at his trap.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Stan met Billy and Jessica at the edge of the barricade. “They’re just on the horizon. Take my service revolver. Get ready.”
“Give it to Jessica,” Billy insisted. He clutched his sledgehammer. “I can’t wait to wallop one of them over the head. Besides, I can't aim a gun for shit.”
“Stand back,” Stan warned them. “The police are taking the front lines. Maybe we can hold them back.”
Stan issued a series of orders to the cops standing in a line armed with shields, batons, high-powered rifles and handguns. “Don’t let them walk onto the pier. If they do, it’s hell on earth for these people. They can’t fight. NOW GET UP THERE AND DO YOUR JOBS!”
The dozens of men stomped behind the blockade of cars to form a line. The monsters were seconds from arriving. The line stopped, and a streamroller plowed through a line of vehicles. Two cars exploded, the lit rags finally igniting the gas tanks. Then another and another boomed and went up until ten cars were engulfed in flames and spitting thick black smoke into the air. The shrapnel did little to slow the monsters down. The plan backfired; in
stead of harming the monsters, it kept them behind a screen.
“Billy, fall back!” Jessica seized him with every ounce of strength and forced him back toward the shops. “If you love me, you won’t let yourself die.”
He was snapped from the moment. She was right, he realized. Their plan wouldn’t work. They had no real way of fighting them. They fled from the scene and retreated into a Nordstrom. Inside, contemporary music played over the loudspeaker, a strange medley of Tori Amos and Kenny G. Billy watched the spectacle through a slit of boards in the main display window.
Ba-bam! Ba-bam! Ba-bam!
A series of booming gunshots, a row of police went down, rose blooms spitting out from their knees. They were sent flailing onto the street. The steamroller crunched their bones, fiercely snapping, and crunching, and flattening them.
“Don’t look, Jessica.”
Fifteen others were hidden in the store. They were against the farthest wall near the men’s cardigans. Billy finally noticed they were also close to the back exit. He caught a whiff of the gasoline smell. The clothing in many displays was sodden with it; the place was set to burn if they broke through.
Maybe we’re not helpless after all…
Billy’s chest tightened and he suffered shortness of breath—and not because of the inadequate air. Purple sunken flesh around the eyes, the rest of the skin off-yellow, the color of the stain on the filter of a smoked cigarette, naked from the waist up, bones proudly etched through the soft tissue, Death Reject walked through the smoke of the dock. The grim features suddenly turned to joy—the promise of death smile.
Two seconds, WHUPWHAM! He detonated from the core. Rib bones, sternum shards, cracked humerus pieces, femurs, metatarsals and organs all turned into violent debris. Many were unharmed by the mess by using their shields, but Billy caught one officer who suffered a rib bone through the throat.
The next wave of attack, young girls in plaid mini-skirts sprinted toward the police bearing swords, axes and bludgeons. A double-edged axe literally sliced a cop’s head in half through his helmet, spurts of blood shooting feet above his head. Another was sliced through the waist by a sword. Bullets shredded the girls, but many wouldn’t stop attacking until they were pulped through and through.
The steamroller continued to shove aside the burning row of cars one-by-one. The flytraps were skulking through pockets of smoke to attack new victims. Billy caught the Intestinator suspended from an overhead light on the dock, slowly coming down like a spider from its web as his guts unrolled to lower him. Billy couldn’t watch anymore. He shook his head, listening to the screams and desperate gunfire.
“There’s not many of them left,” Billy sighed in horror. “This isn’t going to work. I have to reach that tent and those corpses.”
“What are you talking about?” Jessica met his eyes. “We’re not stepping out there.”
“We won’t have any choice soon enough. They’ll rip through this barricade in no time flat. So what if we torch the store? We run outside, and there they are, and there we are.”
Jessica clutched onto him. “We’re not surviving this, are we?”
“If we die, I’m not taking it lightly. Andy Ryerson has contacted me twice through dead bodies. I need to be around corpses, damn it. He said to wait. He said he'd help me when it really counted.”
“I’d say now is the time it counts.”
As Billy glanced out the window again, seeing the battle continue, he wouldn’t have to wait a moment longer for Andy Ryerson's help.
Stan blasted his shotgun at the woman whose face split in half to unveil a living brain beneath. Its chest erupted, and she faltered dead. Their skin was so soft, so easily destroyed, he thought. They weren’t human—obviously—but almost a half-way replication of human.
His shotgun was empty, and his belt had run out of shells. He crouched to his feet and picked double-edged axe from a severed arm. He plucked each finger from the handle one by one.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph…
He ducked when the pavement kicked up shards, damaged by gunfire. The steamroller was headed in his direction. The gunner had murdered half his men and flattened them into the pavement. He checked the remaining stores. The people inside were safe for now.
“Die, you greasy pig!”
A cute girl in pigtails of blonde hair and a checkered black and white flannel skirt—the total package the equivalent of a Catholic schoolgirl—drove a knife in his direction. She missed. He kicked her in the stomach, but she rolled to the side and returned a kick to his balls. He landed on all fours shrieking in pain.
“Your manhood must be removed!”
He wheezed, “What are you talking about?”
She let out a girlish shriek of attack, but she slipped in blood, spilling backward. He forced himself to keep fighting, and he was about to land the axe into her back when an automatic weapon delivered thirty bullets into her body.
The machine gun fire continued, this time pushing Stan up against a hatchback and pumping his chest full of bullets.
Officer Paul Richards picked off the monsters from the rooftop. He was a marksman in the military. The Browning 240 with a Pathfinder infra red scope shot out the skull of another split-faced demon. He caught the silver glint of the eyes embedded in the brain all turn to red and yellow pus once the hollow point round was delivered into its cortex.
“Take that, you bastards!”
He blasted six more rounds, this time preventing the schoolgirl with a mace from landing it on Officer Luke Greenwood’s head. Luke came alive with relief and shot the schoolgirl point blank in the face. Everybody on the force had seen enough to forgo procedure or mercy in order to save their asses.
He adjusted his sights to the person driving the steamroller. The face was literally a skull with a layer of blackened flesh, crusted with putrefaction. The man was dressed as a construction worker, hardhat included.
Your hardhat won’t save you from my bullet.
He tightened his aim. Teased the trigger. Waited two seconds for the best moment.
And then he couldn’t focus. All he could hear was vicious slurping and sucking sounds. His field of vision tilted, spun, and then his sight blanked out altogether.
The morgue vampire tramp sucked from the torn neck stump in her clutches as she flew back into the crowd for another victim to attack.
Adam Briggs wasn’t a cop, but he stayed on the frontlines with two six-shooter replicas crafted after Jesse James’s pistols. He kept them clean and workable for years for show, but now he finally got to use them. He was currently trapped against the wall of the Maine Dock Eatery, a seafood joint. The walls were closed up within, and he couldn’t hide inside. He pounded against the boarded-up door, but nobody came to his rescue. What surrounded him were flannel-wearing, chaw-chewing farmers. Their eyes horrified him. Fourteen of them aimed their pitchforks at him, ready to impale him.
He was good at counting the bullets he’d fired—if he was good at anything at all—and knew only one remained in each gun. Adam had no time to reload. Seconds, they’d be upon him.
“SOMEBODY PLEASE LET ME IN!”
Maybe nobody’s in there.
No, they’re just not going to open the fucking door!
Adam fired at the closest one, a farmer with sun-baked skin and a five o’clock shadow of grizzled gray and black. The forehead split open in a V-shape from the bullet entry and spat out neon green ooze. The farmer fell forwards, somehow landing on his own pitchfork.
“Take that you dumb bastard! YEAH! FUCK YOU!”
More of the farmers in the background were hoarding dead bodies. They were stacking them—forming them into bales of human corpses. Baling wire held the mess together. Mangled and terror-stricken faces glared back at himliving or dead, he couldn’t look them in the eye.
He dropped one gun, now empty. The last gun he clutched with two hands. He stared from the gun, to the farmers, the gun, to the bobbing pitchforks, the gun, to the beads of blood drippi
ng from the jagged points, the gun, the bits of flesh caught between the jagged points, to the gun, then the second wave of farmers, and Adam finally swallowed the barrel and pulled the trigger.
Wesley Hooper had manned the wrecking ball for his entire career, demolishing a variety of condemned buildings to create new space for industrialization, but this job was the most exhilarating. He swung Becky—the biggest ball breaker he’d known in his life—into a flying demon. The ball broke half the bones in her body, and the demon flapped with the use of only one wing and crashed into the harbor.
“This is a no fly zone, bitch!”
The ball had enough momentum to swing back down onto the dock and punch through a legion of schoolgirls—three of them completely exploding into bits of gory matter. “School’s in session, bitches!”
The ball lost its momentum. Wesley prepared another attack when he was thrown from the crane. A body latched onto him, its legs wrapping around his hips, its arms around his arms. “You crazy fucker, let me go!”
The corpse counted under its breath, “Five, four, three…”
The body clutching him was ice cold. Purple-gray-blue flesh covered him. A corpse.
“…two—ONE!”
Exploding bones and shrapnel pierced Wesley’s body.
Detective Kelly Odentag’s waist was wrapped by what appeared to be a rope, but it was not rope. An inch thick, purplish-pink, swollen, pulsing and breathing, the coils were very much alive. She was being dragged on the street, pulled forward. The lasso had wrapped around her as she was lighting another car on fire via the gas tank. She crashed into dead bodies as she was propelled forward, her back bruised and bleeding. She was coated in the blood of her fallen co-workers and fellow citizens.
Kelly was lifted up and over a mashed vehicle and landed back down on the street. She was semi-conscious now and wished she was dead when she saw what dragged her. The viscera squeezed around her belly so tight her innards spat out both ends of her body.
