B-Movie War

by Alan Spencer

One of their heads turned to face him.

  That’s when he howled, his sanity be damned. The old woman’s face was writhing with maggots. Clumps of them came off with her cheeks in curdled cheese hunks, leaving bare bones exposed. She said this as if her throat was made of mud, “The entrance to hell opened and maggots ate my body.”

  Oh, so that’s what happened. And you’re carrying me where? Your intentions must be good and all if you’re telling me how you died and NOT how you’re fucking alive!

  Vic thrashed in the maggot-covered corpses’ grips. He trusted nobody. His senses were betraying him. His adrenaline and fear trigger were the only true indicators he was alive and not dead and trapped in some wild hell where killers and monsters roamed everywhere.

  He was carried into a strange hallway. It smelled of bleach. The floors were buffed. The walls were nothing special, white blurs that passed him by, with only the large steel door like a bank vault’s to steal his attention up ahead.

  Before Vic could put anything else together, the limbs of those who carried him disconnected with the uncouth slide of bone against bone. Then rest of their bodies were melting fast in a caramel mudslide.

  The corpse woman and the three other corpses had fallen onto the ground. Each of their bodies were melting, their flesh and insides plopping into a sludge stew onto the tiles. He was free. Vic forced his body up from the ground. Standing there covered in blood and mess, he gasped in shock when one of the steel vault doors came open. There was a series of vault doors going down another hallway. The man behind the door held his arms up to signify ‘I’m unarmed. And I’m your friend.’

  The guy was in his mid-thirties, a hundred pounds overweight with the stocky build of a computer geek, add acne, add thick glasses, add an unkempt course beard that belonged on his pubes and not his face, and add a constant smile that gave him the permanent label of “smart ass”. He wore an “Atari” T-shirt and jeans that needed to be washed last week. He introduced himself as Jimmy Nelson.

  Vic didn’t shake Jimmy’s hand. He asked questions instead. “Who are you?—I mean besides your name. I was dragged her by dead people, and and I rode a bus with Satan and some other dangerous motherfuckers, so you better—”

  “That’s from that one movie.” Jimmy thought hard, putting two fingers to his lips as if tasting an intricate wine. “Oh, it’s from Satan Drives the Bus. I remember that one. Very obscure. Satan drives old serial killers away from purgatory back to the living world. That’s when they get revenge against those who wronged them. It’s a cheap device, but it’s entertaining. Great vintage cheesy fli—gaaak!”

  Vic’s gigantic hand swallowed up Jimmy’s neck. Up close, Jimmy smelled of body odor and barbeque pork rinds. What was wrong with this jackass? And how did the punk know his name?

  “The way you’re talking, you’re one of them out there, maybe. Give me a reason not to squeeze your head off.”

  His words sandblasted away Jimmy’s delighted expression. Jimmy was a fraction of a second from losing his bladder, but he cut a fart that could remove paint from a fence instead.

  Vic’s anger subsided into disgust. “I hope you just didn’t shit your pants. Look, I’m going to let up on my hold on your neck, and then you wow me. Give me a reason to back off, or like I said, I give your neck THE SQUEEZE.”

  Jimmy was shivering in his skin. The kid cut yet another fart, and Vic couldn’t live that one down. “Jesus Christ, guy, you stick a cabbage up your ass? You’re not a monster. You’re worse, dude. You need to take a shit.”

  Jimmy’s cheeks reddened. “I’m just nervous.”

  “It doesn’t mean I can trust you. So how can I trust you?”

  “Those corpses brought you here for a reason. Vic, I have something to show you. I’ll explain everything, but it starts in this vault. If you don’t trust me,” he removed an Uzi behind his back, “you keep this trained on me.”

  “Wow, where the hell you get a piece like that?” Vic swiped it, clutching it in both hands. “I could’ve used this hours ago.”

  Jimmy worked his way back into the vault. Once Vic entered, Jimmy closed the door and locked it. “Better safe than sorry. I know what’s out there, man. I’ve seen thousands of horror movies. It’s all happening for real. The movies really are coming to life.”

  The room was full of steel plated slots on the walls. Each required a key to open. Thousands of slots total occupied the room, Vic guessed.

  Vic asked, “So these vaults are full of these slots? What are they holding?”

  “Movie reels. They’re preserved and kept from damage. This room carries everything, from the classics to the crap.”

  The Uzi was loaded. Vic checked. He would open fire on the kid whose true colors were showing. Jimmy was an adult nerd who watched movies, ate take-out food, worked online at home, and didn’t date girls. Why did this joker have such a hot shit gun? Why did he seem to know the answers to what was going on out there? How come he was scared enough to almost poop his pants when Vic grabbed his neck, but he seemed relatively unfazed by the monsters and living dead out there?

  Damn good questions required damn good answers, Vic thought.

  Vic beat strangers to a pulp who had gotten too close to the girls stripping at Bazooka’s. He could make guys cough up blood after socking them in the gut so hard. Drunk people were bad, but drunk horny people were far worse. This Jimmy Nelson guy would be easy to crack, Vic decided. He would play nice and see where that got him. And if Jimmy ran him in circles, well…

  Vic asked, “What’s your favorite movie?”

  Jimmy made a sour face. “Um, well, naming one favorite movie is totally impossible. Those people who say one single movie is their favorite can stick it in their rear, because they’re full of crap. It’s an impossible question to answer if you’re a serious film appreciator.”

  Patience, Vic thought. You don’t have to hit him just yet.

  “Okay. I’ll try again. What type do you prefer, if it’s possible for you to say?”

  “You mean what genre of film I like the best? Let’s say sub-genre. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, whatever. Sub-genre. So tell me.”

  “The schlocky ones. You know, the trash. The crap. The so bad it’s funny. The campy ones. The nacho cheesy ones.”

  “I don’t know if I get what you’re saying. If a movie’s bad, then it’s bad, right?”

  Jimmy gave a sigh of indignation. “You’re wrong, pal. Have you seen Chainsaw Ballerinas? Or Crazy Cop 2? Maybe Varmints? or Rodents? or P.E.S.T.S. No? None of those? Then how about Cannibal Sleepwalkers? And while we’re on the subject of cannibal movies, there’s one just called Fat People. They’re fat people who were born with enlarged hunger glands. They like to eat skinny people. Simple concept. And it makes sense. Fat people would like to eat skinny people. I’m talking about the classics, man. Pure cheese sliced thick. Put it on my plate, and I’ll eat it.”

  This guy’s seen too many horror movies. He’s spent too many nights alone without a woman. Or he’s seen what’s out there and has lost it. He picked up the Uzi from some dead guy and hid in here, saw me, and started acting tough. This kid’s crazy. Maybe he needs a punch to the face to bring him back to reality.

  Vic cocked the fist that wasn’t clutching the Uzi. He heard his bones pop. His muscles tightened, gathering the power to drive the freight train home.

  “I wouldn’t do that.” A grumpy voice was followed up by the cold steel barrel pressed up against his neck. “Just let the kid talk. What he says involves you, Victor Greaves. You’re here to lead us to victory. But first, we’ve got to hop aboard that Cessna plane. The sooner we get going, the better.”

  A thousand different things Vic could’ve said, but only one question left his mouth. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Jimmy answered. “He’s my dad.”

  “Your dad?”

 
The gun was pressed a little too hard into his neck. Jimmy might be easy to take down, but his dad (the guy whose profile was like a Sumo wrestler in hunter’s fatigues) might be a different battle altogether, Vic decided.

  The situation needed some serious diffusing.

  “I’m putting down the Uzi,” Vic said. “The shit out there has got me keyed up. I was attacked by a bunch of shit that your son thinks he saw in a horror movie. My family was murdered today. So let’s cut the shit. I’m in no mood. Tell me what you want from me. I respect straight talk.”

  After putting the gun down, the barrel was removed from his neck. The dad said, “Just let my son talk.”

  Vic nodded, indicating he would listen.

  Jimmy thanked his dad. “Okay, I’ll get to the point. I understand your skepticism of us, Vic. A lot has happened that is very unbelievable.”

  Father and son guided Jimmy between the shelves of steel slots, but not before Jimmy took back the Uzi from Vic. The farther they walked, Vic noticed many of the slots were left open and emptied out. They were slightly larger than bus station lockers.

  “You see the empty lockers? They took the film reels a long time ago. Robbed the place blind. They’ve robbed every place like this across the world. They’ve collected every horror reel possible. Thousands of them.”

  “Who’s been taking them?”

  Jimmy sighed. “Simply put, the bad guys. Let me finish what I’m saying before we get into it again.”

  “Fine. Keep talking.”

  The dad stayed right behind Vic. The barrel of the buck rifle was pointed in Vic’s direction. Vic had no choice but to listen.

  “The movies that were taken, they’re all in the horror department. To say “horror” is putting it broadly. Imagine every category, like funny, sleazy, hack ’em and slash ’em, boobs and blood, masked serial killers, vampires and zombies, Frankenstein and nature gone awry, like your piranha and mutated fish movies. The list goes on.”

  Vic remembered the kids who were fish with insane teeth before he stepped onto the bus with Satan. He didn’t like where this conversation was going.

  “I guess they wouldn’t use a movie like Police Academy, would they?” The dad joked.

  Father and son shared a hearty laugh.

  Vic stood there perplexed.

  “Sorry, go ahead Jimmy. Son, you’re too funny. Okay, get Mr. Greaves up to speed.”

  “They only stole horror movies where horrible things happen to people. I’m going to spit it out right now. Stay with me. The spirits of the dead have watched the living ever since the first person in existence died. Imagine throughout time the dead watching us live on without them, and their anger building. I’m talking about burning hatred. Billions of souls seething with ideas on how they’d love to dispatch us. For years, they’ve gone on disagreeing with each other on how to properly take us out. Plagues, diseases, cancers, the dead engineered them all. They somehow managed to infect our world from beyond the grave. It wasn’t enough to take out the human race. We’ve risen up to their challenge. So far, they’ve failed, but what they’re doing now…there’s a strong chance they’ll succeed this time. We’ll all be dead.

  “I know what I’m saying is far-fetched. You must believe in what your eyes see versus any modes of logic. You battled them out there, Vic. Think about it. Imagine how many people have died in the history of the world. The number is astronomical. That’s a huge think tank of spirits putting their minds together. They’ve wanted to kill the living, but they want it to be spectacular. They want to rub salt in our wounds. It’s systematic and devious. What’s happening right now out there, it’s going to be a war on a global scale. Nothing with a pulse will be spared.”

  Vic couldn’t help but ask, “How do you know all of this?”

  “Do you remember what happened in Chicago about three months ago?”

  “Of course. It was all over the news. Terrorists bombed the entire city. Uncle Sam showed ’em. Chased that Al Qaeda group into some fucking caves, or something. That picture of President Ted Yearling standing over their bodies in the desert holding up an AK-47 was awesome. It was my screen saver for weeks.”

  Jimmy’s face turned disgusted. His eyes were bogged down by terrible emotions. His words were heavy and grim. “Those photos are fake. Chicago was a lie. It wasn’t terrorists who destroyed the city. It was monsters. It was the movies. The reels come to life.”

  Vic had that sinking feeling in his belly, like realizing a lie you believed in for many years proven false. Like when he caught his ex-wife fucking a man in her bed.

  “But…how do you know that for sure?”

  Father and son said, “We’ll show you how we know the things we know.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The lights in the vault flickered off. They were cast in darkness. Vic braced himself, his body locked in a fighting stance. The darkness had the depths of infinity. Then there were weird noises. The groan of old pipes. The hiss of scalding heat. The drips of water from pipes. The breezes of air traveling through endless corridors. The room was suddenly icy with a chill. Then the smells of death arrived. Vic imagined embalming fluid, the tang of corpses melting in the sun, of heat puckered flesh, the thick cutting smell of the blackest of soils dug up from the very bottoms of the earth. The darkness remained abyss black as the sounds of human suffering increased. Sharp screams of people being tortured and executed. Chains banged against walls so hard they shed sparks. The pleas from those who’d lost their sanity echoed strong. Wet vomit hit the floor. Soupy bowels excreted. The room sounded like a piece of wood giving to weight, only the sound was amplified a hundred fold. The noises of the damned. The stench of putrescence eons old. It all consumed Vic who was on the ground, curling up, protecting himself. A great burst of air forced him out of the ball.

  The darkness ended and was replaced by human faces. Hundreds of thousands of faces. His name was on their lips, beseeching him, “Believe, Victor! Believe, Vic-tor! Be-lieeeeeeeeve!” The human faces were peeled of skin and bared to skeleton. They shouted in union, “SAVE THE WORLD FROM DEATH AND TERROR, VIC-TOR!”

  The room went back to normal. The skeletal faces vanished. The lights kicked on. Jimmy and his dad were shaking Vic, telling him everything was okay, to snap out of it, that he was back with the living, back with the good people and to stop shouting, but Vic couldn’t stop. Burning hot tears streamed down his cheeks. He kept scooting away from them on all fours. It wasn’t until Jimmy poured water over his head that it knocked some sense into him.

  Jimmy placed Vic down on a metal fold-up chair. Vic sat there for a long moment before speaking. “You got anything stronger than water to drink?”

  Jimmy’s dad, who Vic learned was named Barry, handed him a pint of bourbon. Vic swigged it back, letting the bullet go down fast. He gave himself enough time to stop crying and then said, “Okay, I—I believe you. Some serious fucked up shit is going on. But how do we stop it?”

  The plan involved waiting. There was a set of windows closer to the back of the room in what Barry called The Hall of Records. Barry had a set of high powered binoculars. He kept scouting the local buildings and streets. He would do so every ten minutes. “It’s quiet out there. They’re not here yet.”

  Vic asked, “Who isn’t here yet?”

  Barry slugged back a root beer in a brown bottle and clicked his tongue like he’d thrown back a sip of the cheapest suds in town. “The Cavalry.”

  “And that would be who?”

  Jimmy was enjoying having superior knowledge over Vic. Vic assumed Jimmy had been picked on as a kid and into his adulthood and was enjoying this moment of one-upmanship. “People who are like us. They’ve been chosen by the dead to fight back against the angry spirits using the movies against us.”

  “But you said the spirits of the dead were pissed off at us. So then why would any dead people help us? I mean if y
ou think about it, right?”

  Jimmy’s eyes were wet with tears that wanted to spill. He too slugged back a nip of the hard root beer. “My brother, his name was Derrick, but everybody called him Nelson. I don’t know why people didn’t call me by my last name like I’m super cool or something. I guess I didn’t have enough friends to merit nicknames like he did. We were alike in many ways. Junk food addicts. Video game junkies. Movie buffs. We put these things before girls. If I could take it back, seeing how the world could end very soon, I’d get laid.”

  Barry tapped his glass to his son’s. “We’re going to survive the war, and you’re going to get laid, boy. If it’s the last thing I do on this earth before taking as many of the bad guys down with me, you’re going to be pulling some ass.”

  Vic smiled at the two of them. He was starting to like them. They were so ridiculous. “Tell me more about your brother, man. Nelson, right?”

  “Nelson was killed in Chicago about three months ago when those movies came to life. The ‘good’ dead tried to help the people in Chicago, but few people survived. The government covered it up. It was a one-night event. The angry dead were so eager to annihilate us, their plan was poorly executed. Not so this time. But I’m getting away from the point.

  “There’s the angry dead, and the dead who care about us. Good spirits still exist. They can occupy dead bodies here for short periods of time. Sometimes, they can occupy a body for minutes, sometimes only seconds, sometimes hours. It depends on how strong they are before the body they inhabit comes apart.”

  The epiphany came to Vic. The dead woman who drove him here, the dead people who carried him into this building, they were all ghosts inhabiting corpses. “It makes sense…I guess.”

  Barry handed Vic a fresh root beer from the foam cooler at their feet. They ate cold turkey sandwiches and munched on a variety of potato chips, beer jerky and candy bars. While they ate, Vic kept asking questions.

  “So Nelson contacted you from beyond the grave, and he told you to wait here, to be ready, so where do we go when the back-up arrives?”