by Alan Spencer
“The name’s Niles Hamilton. I’ll be flying you to your destination tonight.”
Vic couldn’t help asking, “But won’t you melt?”
Niles flipped switches and prepared for flight. “Some of the dead only have so much strength beyond the grave. Some only get a few seconds. But dead people like me, I’m borrowing the strength of other spirits to get you where you need to be, before I too, as you say, ‘melt’. Enough talk. Buckle up. I’m on borrowed time. Relax. This ride might get bumpy. We’re going to New Jersey.”
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-One
President Ted Yearling imagined terrorist attacks happening on the homeland on a daily basis. He also suffered nightmares of his nation just blowing up for no reason whatsoever. Everything reduced to smithereens by something and somebody horrible. Or a terrorist attack where only the good people were turned into pink mist and everybody vile and evil would continue to exist. He shuttered at the thought of such a world. But the president never pictured death coming in the form of hideous red-eyed bats. The Ear Eaters. They swooped down from the sky by the thousands. They tore through The White House walls smashing windows, chewing through the wood and eating the ears of his security agents. He watched the black bats chew off people’s ears, crawl into their ear canal and climb out their eyes and mouths covered in brains and blood.
If this was terrorism, there was no way to fight it.
The bats made the most hideous shrieking sounds as they attacked. He imagined brake pads screeching against chalkboards. President Yearling was about to enjoy a morning jog when he saw his wife and children suspended way up in the air being carried off by the hideous bats. Piece by piece, they were dismantled, until his family was nothing more than bloody chunks glistening on the pavement. Guns blasted from every direction. The city was alive with exploding vehicles, machine guns prattling and bloodcurdling screams. Various attacks were being perpetrated that he couldn’t wrap his mind around.
Was that a giant alligator smashing into an elementary school?
Was the south side covered in walking corpses?
Were those silverback gorillas pounding their way into the local museums?
Was that thirty people boiling in a vat of grease like French fries?
“Take cover, Mr. President!” Agent Wilkins blasted rapid-fire shots from his piece, taking down four foamy mouthed bats about to swoop down and eat the president. “We must take shelter. It’s not safe here, sir. Not safe anywhere!”
Agent Wilkins guided the president through the back way of The White House, then down into an elevator shaft that channeled to the safety of a bunker below ground. It was just him and the agent. Nobody else. Ted asked if anybody else had survived.
“That’s yet to be determined,” Wilkins said, winded. “They just appeared out of nowhere and took everybody out.”
“What took everybody out?”
Agent Wilkins was bleeding from his left ribcage. “I, I don’t know. I wish I could kill every last son-of-a-bitch bad guy out there. I’d do it for you. I’d do it for this country.”
Ted could see the agent was dizzy from blood loss. He was babbling American sentiment when he should be stopping his wound from bleeding. Ted removed his sweatshirt and pressed it against Wilkins’ ribs.
“Who did this to you?”
Wilkins slumped down to the floor, grimacing in pain. “It was a man in doctor’s scrubs. It said ‘Dr. Hackemov’ on his breast pocket. He sliced me with a scalpel. It was the biggest scalpel I’ve ever seen. I went in real deep.”
The elevator stopped and opened. Two new agents met them. One ushered Ted forward, and the other tended to Wilkins.
“He needs medical attention now!” Ted shouted. “He saved my life.”
Ted turned around when the agent didn’t reply. The agent had Wilkins by the head. The man’s hands were huge! Three times normal size and pulsing with bulging veins and impossible muscles. The two hands smashed in Wilkins’ head, compressing it to under half of its size. And that pop sound! Ted held back vomit.
While Ted held back his vomit, the remaining agent blasted Huge Hands four times in the head until the agent landed headless on the floor.
Agent Dempkey, the only living agent, urged Ted down the long hallway made of white cinder block painted walls. They were headed toward what looked like a steel door. “It’s safe in here, sir. We must keep you in here until things get under control topside.”
Ted put his hand up to the entry reader. The bunker’s door came open with a hermetic hiss. Dempkey and Ted entered, then Dempkey threw the barrier shut. The bunker was a small space with a bed, shower, food rations, and in the farthest corner a wall of television screens. Ted studied the screens needing many things. He craved reassurance that whatever the hell was happening was being taken care of immediately. What he watched on the television screens made his stomach drop and his sanity start to slip.
Newsfeeds and visuals from various parts of the world played on the screens. The United Nations was flanked by men and woman wielding axes, hatchets and scary bludgeons. Britain’s Prime Minster’s head was on a sharpened bamboo stick, clutched by a band of savage jungle cannibals. The Eiffel Tower was taken down by a humongous squid monster. A giant hooker the size of a skyscraper stomped through a city, smashing America’s military forces into what looked like stepped-on ketchup packets. Armed forces from the cities in Germany, Iceland, Saudi Arabia and Russia were outflanked by hideous tarantulas and dinosaurs. Helsinki had melted, the screen only showing an ocean of boiling flesh and blood. Parts of Hungary were filled with hunchback beasts and ballerinas swinging chainsaws. Every ocean on every continent was filled with piranha and other sea creature beasts with sharp exoskeletons and even sharper teeth. At the pyramids of Egypt, tourists were being chased by road plows and wrecking balls, each helmed by a hideous crew of undead construction workers. Third World countries were being cannibalized by zombies. Throughout the Czech Republic, the screen image revealed the streets savaged by punk girls in leather clothes swinging death chains and hulking men with muscles punching out chests and ripping out their victims’ hearts and eating them with savage hunger. Dentists were jamming drills into subsections of Poland’s citizenry, somehow ripping out a person’s full of set of teeth in one yank. The dentists would make the bleeding set of C.H.O.M.P.E.R.S. talk, then they’d set the teeth down on the ground, and the teeth would crawl by muscle tissue and eat everybody in sight. Air Force bases and military installations in every part of the globe were flanked by ghouls, ghosts and monsters of unknown origins.
Ted couldn’t watch it anymore. So much death displayed everywhere across every city, nation and inhabited place. This wasn’t a publicity stunt, or a trick to get Americans to buy into new legislation. Forget “No Child Left Behind” or protecting lobbyists from real legal and moral scrutiny. These were monsters killing the nation with no obvious way to stop them. All hope was lost, Ted kept telling himself. Nothing could stop this terror that affected everybody equally. No back-turning or blind eye to suffering, because everybody was in this shit together.
Dempkey was watching the screens in wide-eyed horror. “This is really happening, isn’t it? There’s no stopping it. Whatever is happening to us won’t be stopped. How can it be stopped? I mean, how can something like this ever end?”
The president wished he had more courageous words to offer the agent. “I only wish I knew what was causing this to happen. Then maybe we could stop it. Maybe we could save lives.”
Dempkey scoffed. “No use throwing around sentiment down here. Pointless, really. You see that security feed? The camera’s pointing outside our door. Care to take a look?”
Ted about collapsed.
Trolls rampaged the hallway. Monsters with active, oozing sores. Mouths carrying dozens of diseases and plagues. Slobber that could melt through metal. Weapons crafted from river rocks, the oldes
t of trees and the unknown bones of felled creatures. Ted felt their presence in the walls and floor, a throbbing. The warning that death was coming.
Dempkey shook Ted’s hand. “I respect you, sir. I think you’re a good man, and I mean that. But the situation’s pretty clear.” Dempkey showed Ted his pistol. “I’m confident I can stick this in my mouth and blow my head off, but you, I’m not so sure. You want me to shoot you, Mr. President, before those things out there batter through that door?”
The vault’s door, what should’ve withstood dynamite, was coming off of its hinges. The sounds of aluminum cans crumpling soon followed. The band of trolls would surely break in. It was only a matter of time. Maybe only seconds.
The president didn’t whisper it, he screamed it, “Do it now, yes! Yeeeeeeeees!”
Dempkey took aim while saying a prayer.
Ted closed his eyes and waited for the bullet to pierce into his brain.
All hope was lost.
Part Five
Chapter Twenty-Two
Penny Baxter floated in several feet of cold blood at The Odyssey Theatre. The sound of red streams trickling between the torn up theatre seats sounded like a rushing waterfall. Coming to, getting to her feet, she screamed when she realized it wasn’t the theatre’s wall she used for purchase. It was a heap of bodies chest tall. Shrieking, Penny backed up from the hill of corpses, her ankles kicking up the ankle-deep river of blood. She looked up and noticed The Odyssey Theatre itself was gone. The roof, the walls and structure were all jagged vestiges of the building. No roof either. It was still nighttime. She could see the parking lot and the residential housing in the distance. Everything was smashed as if bombers had laid waste to the area. A strange light flickered ahead of her that was the yellow of a light bulb. Behind a pile of shredded theatre seats, chunks of broken up wall and a concrete pillar, was a standing reel projector. It kept playing a movie, though she didn’t see a projected image.
That didn’t matter. What mattered was the usher dressed in the red bellhop looking uniform with a matching hat. She was pale fleshed. Purple bags around the eyes. Black lipstick. The expression on her face was the very definition of torment. The flashlight in her hand kicked up steam from the business end. Penny remembered how the light seared a person in half when they tried to escape during the forced horror film fest.
Penny lowered to her knees and stayed still.
The usher hadn’t seen her.
In the near distance, fog started brewing, thickening the backdrop of night. Things were moving out there. Rats battled over a severed head in the corner. She caught sight of what looked like a gigantic boa constrictor crawling into a ten story building. A man dressed as a doctor was studying a woman’s body impaled on a stop sign. The doctor was using a rubber triangle to check for reflexes on the corpse. A set of Doberman dogs were mowing down on a pile of guts that hung out of a shopping cart. Bats flew overhead, the legion covering a mile’s worth of sky. Their shrieks were high-pitched death calls. A skinny old man dressed in a hazard suit bent down to cut out the eyes of the dead with a scalpel and replace his own peepers with the stolen ones. A bum stood with a Salvation Army bucket, the bucket brimming with severed fingers. Through the stripped down walls of what used to be “Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles,” a pot-bellied cook was frying up bodies in wire baskets in a vat of grease so huge the guy had to climb a ladder to reach the top. Penny could smell peanut oil and charred meat and gagged.
Before she could take in the other spectacles of terror, the usher was standing right above her. The flashlight was shedding blue sparks, heating up to slice her into pieces. Penny wanted to tear turf to escape, but at each route stalked new threats. The ability to beg for her life didn’t arrive. She was rendered mute by the weight of her fear. This was insanity made reality. Horror movies co-existing with real life.
Penny was helpless to fight back.
Or so she thought.
Whatever gut check her subconscious had undergone, Penny was unaware of it. She bolted up off of her knees, bent forward and rammed the usher with her shoulder. They both went down, the usher striking the ground on her back. The flashlight rolled and hit Penny’s shoe. She scooped it up and then turned it on. Searing hot, bursting with blue sparks, the circular line from the flashlight shot forward and sliced the usher’s head vertically in half.
Clutching onto her weapon, Penny gasped at the gory sight.
Her heart was beating a hundred miles an hour. Every inch of her trembled. No time to decode the impossible. From the sky, something swung down so large, it squashed the DMV building a block from where Penny stood. The building was flattened in two seconds.
Penny ran, though she didn’t know where to. She stopped in her tracks once she saw the cook at “Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles” lay out a fried corpse on a table and salt it down. Customers were waiting at makeshift seats with forks in hand and cloth bibs to chow down. They kept licking their lips. The intensity of their voracious appetites were scrawled boldly onto their hideous faces.
Bile rose to the back of her throat seeing this. Penny vomited yellow gruel onto the pavement. The release didn’t make her feel any better.
Penny was startled when the phone in a nearby booth rang. It stood unaffected amid the streets uprooted from the ground and the upside down ten car pile-up.
The phone kept ringing.
Danger lurked everywhere. She lingered. Stared at the booth as if the phone itself could say whether its intentions were good or not.
She worried the ringing would draw something near. In a knee-jerk response, she entered the phone booth and picked up.
Nervous, “H-hello?”
The voice was soft. An older woman’s words. It sounded like a recording played on an old record player. “Little Penny, you have to listen to me. I once taught you to trust in the good lord to watch over you, but now I’m asking you to trust in your Aunt Rita. Follow the arrows. Trust me, Penny. Save yourself. Use your head. You must survive or else kiss everybody’s ass goodbye. Follow. The. Arrows.”
The line went dead.
“Aunt Rita—Aunt Rita, tell me what’s going on! And why are you calling me? You’re dead!”
The line was silent.
She was on her own.
Follow the arrows. What does she mean?
A great shadow eclipsed the lower part of the street. Then from a distance, the concussion of devastation. Another building dropped, toppled over by something unknown. Flashlight in hand, Penny stepped out of the phone booth and kept her eyes open for the arrows her Aunt Rita was talking about. Crazy as the idea was, it was all she had in her predicament.
And there it was, a glowing green arrow appeared on the sidewalk right in front of her. The arrow glowed for ten seconds, then it evanesced. A message replaced the arrows, appearing at once as if stamped in by some ghostly force.
Follow The Arrows
Keep Your Head Down
Don’t Scream No Matter
What You See
Penny’s stomach sank to her feet. She had no real compass for where she was anymore, the fog so heavy and billowing from the ground as if a thousand fog machines were churning the thick stuff out constantly. Somehow, she could view the distant skyscraper. A modern marvel of architecture. Penny gasped at the giant squid monster slithering up the side of it. The squid was half the size of the skyscraper, its many legs covered in nodules and dripping with a nebulous fluid. Breaking through glass windows it rooted out its victims.
Follow the arrows. Just follow the arrows.
Arrows appeared and disappeared as she moved. They were directing her north. Penny sucked in breath after breath to subdue the insanity of the situation and find something logical against the illogical.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Machine gun fire prattled two blocks down. Five military vehicles were parked, their guns aim
ed at the sky. She thought they were aiming at the squid creature, but that was too far downtown for them to be aiming at. Whatever the sky produced, it came down and picked them up and discarded the gunners. Bodies, like stick figures, were hurtled so far in the air and vanished. Probably dead. Stranger yet, the bodies thrown up hadn’t come back down.
The big shadow from the sky returned, striking and pounding the earth with concussions like shifting tectonic plates. It slashed a ten foot building in half with one swipe. Drove another building into the ground in two seconds, jettisoning a great plume of dust into the air. Scattering people were mashed into the street as if by—Penny closed and opened her eyes, double checking her vision—giant fingers! The jostled ground threw Penny onto all fours. She landed on top of a dead panhandler. He bled from the sides of his head, where his ears used to be now gummed up pulp. Something had eaten the man’s ears!
The guy’s eyes shot open. The corpse hands helped her up. The bones in his arm came undone, and his skin began melting down his bones like hot caramel. “Follow the arrows. Hurry! Run! Not much time left, Penny! Your uncle is still alive. You must stay alive, or else everyone will perish!”
It was then Penny finally understood what was happening. The dead were leading her on. Helping her. The world had gone to hell, and she was one of few survivors.
Blood dripped from the sky. She caught red streaks flit back and forth in her line of vision. Something was flying above her. The occasional gnarled corpse would fall down from on high with torn out throats. Shrieks, both laughter and consternation, stalked Penny. They were the eagle, and she was the field mouse. She prayed the winged demon-eyed villains didn’t swoop down and take her next.
