by Alan Spencer
On the street next to a manhole, the neon green words appeared then disappeared:
HURRY
“We’re going as fast as we can, damn you!” Vic didn’t mean to lose it. He was beat up, shell-shocked from many explosions, and it felt like his shoulder could unlock any moment from carrying the heavy chest. “I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying. Fuck!”
He could only imagine how Jimmy felt. He was shocked when Jimmy belted out, “Come on, Vic, don’t be a pussy. You scared to go down the dark tunnel?”
“What’d you just say?”
“Quit being a pussy and MOVE!”
Vic smiled on the inside. It was pretty damn funny to hear Jimmy talk like that. He wouldn’t let Jimmy know that.
They entered the snout together.
Chapter Thirty
The way was pitch black and hot without ventilation or incoming air. The walls of the anteater’s snout were textured with bristles. Nose hairs, Vic imagined, but the nose hairs were clotted with bodies. Impaled on them were dead torsos wet with bloodied clothes. Vic pictured hundreds of people sucked up into the snout and either trapped there to die or killed on impact.
They walked for what felt like miles. They rested on and off, their arms tired from lugging their burden. The more times they took a break, the longer it took for them to pick up the chest again and keep moving. The air was getting thinner. They were covered in sweat and the stench of hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies expiring in this humid, fetid trap.
“I can’t keep going,” Jimmy said, his voice so much like a pouty child’s Vic wanted to slug him. “My arms are killing me. This thing is too heavy.”
“Now who’s being a pussy? Change your tampon and let’s go.”
Every body pinned to the fleshy walls, spread out on the floor, or writhing on the ceiling, suddenly thrashed in place, reaching out to them, every pale cold dead hand pushing and urging them forward. Their warnings were a dizzying chant. Hundreds begged them to forge on:
“Hurry/death awaits us/death is your future/you’ll die a thousand deaths/eternal slumber with be bloodbath after bloodbath/the dead will seek retribution/help us/help us before no one’s alive to be saved/you don’t want to die/to die is to accept damnation and suffering/suffering ten- fold for fighting against their plans/save your soul/save us all/keep moving/faster/hurry/don’t stop/don’t turn back/fear not/it’s much worse to be dead than alive/no forgiveness if you fail/you will be sentenced/guilty you shall suffer/run/move/seek the end of the tunnel.”
And they did. Vic found the energy to keep pumping his legs and carry the wooden chest. Jimmy did too. Covering good ground, they stopped when the chest hit a door.
The way out.
When they opened the door and went inside, they found the hallway behind the entry point was narrow and undamaged. The walls and ceiling were intact, and best yet, Vic thought, there wasn’t a single dead body anywhere. He shut the door behind them. Once he did, the corpses chanting their warnings suddenly stopped. Silence. The two of them had done what the dead wanted. A neon green arrow formed on the wall then vanished. They followed the hallway, the way lit by the ceiling lights. The building had power. That was promising, Vic thought.
Seeing Jimmy covered in dried blood and the look of disgust on his face made Vic wonder what he looked like. How had they made it this far without being killed?
There was no sign to indicate what this building was used for. It was vast, as it took them forever to find the end of the hall. The channel ended and opened up to a front lobby. The windows were boarded up and reinforced with a handcrafted wooden barricade. On the other side of the building, another barricade was built, walls supported by wooden beams, new walls, another set of wooden beams, to block something out. He smelled sawdust and steel. These were built recently, he realized.
Then Vic’s gaze fell on the man sitting on a bench right in front of a barricade. He wore a checkered shirt rolled up to the elbows. He was a thick man with long gray hair. He was smoking a cigarette.
“You here with the shit we need? If so, it’s about fucking time.”
“It’s a bit crazy out there, if you haven’t noticed.” Vic did his best to not launch across the room and break the guy’s jaw. “We did our best, asshole. A lot of good people have died out there.”
“Whoa, big guy. You’re giving me the eyes you’d give a punching bag. Both of you stay where you are. First thing’s first. I have to put on my glasses.”
They placed the chest on the ground to rest their arms. Then Vic gawked in confusion as the man placed a pair of 3-D glasses on his face. One blue lens, one red lens. The guy looked like a mental backwoodsman. All he needed was a movie screen and a bag of popcorn, and he was set to go to the movies. Minus the sawed off .22.
“Stay there a second, please.”
Vic couldn’t see the man’s eyes through the colored lenses. His forehead wrinkled, scrutinizing them. “Yeah,” he whispered. “Yep, you’re alive. You’re not one of those dead people either. You’ve got to be careful. Good and bad dead spirits, it’s hard to tell the difference without these B-movie goggles.”
Jimmy questioned with a smile. “B-movie goggles?”
“Yeah, that’s what I call them. I was a woodshop teacher at a junior high. I taught kids how to play with wood.” He paused for the laughter that didn’t come. “I always stressed to wear your protective eyewear, your goggles, in case something flies in your eyes. Never mind, it’s been a long, weird, unbelievable night. Forgive me if I’m acting strange.”
Vic remained standoffish. “Who are you? What are we doing here exactly?”
The stranger introduced himself as Greg Manley. Greg said they could call him Mr. Manley if they preferred. His students loved calling him “Mr. Manley”. Vic and Jimmy introduced themselves. That finished, Greg stood with the gun pointed at the floor.
“This building is invisible to our enemies, but not for long. The dead are helping us in every way that they can. That gives us just enough time to strategize and fight back. The resistance is happening below our feet. Our crew will be happy that you’ve arrived with the chest. I was worried you wouldn’t make it.” Greg gave them a genuine look of sympathy. “Understandably so. It’s insanity out there. The plan is to go downstairs and kick start our retaliation. Take the chest with you and follow me. Our work begins now. We’ve only got a few hours before we’re not safe anymore. Before the evil fuckers out there start coming in after us.”
Greg guided them down a set of emergency stairs. When he opened the door to the next floor, there were offices on both sides of the hallway. Every room had a set of sleeping people. Supplies were scattered and piled against the walls, items ranging from jackhammers, bags of concrete, rows of handguns, shotguns and machine guns, dozens of tool boxes, wooden planks, nail guns, chainsaws, ladders, gas cans, tires, tile saws, plastic tubs of lug nuts and screws, sand bags and other various things. Families clung to each other in each of the offices, including children, husband and wives who were missing parts of their families, and others who were alone with that expression of being misplaced and having nothing to channel their grief into except more dread and fear.
Greg raised his voice to gain everybody’s attention. “Okay people, the time is now to work. Our help has arrived. The next plan is to set the traps, fortify the barricades and arm ourselves. The plan is to buy time. Every monster and enemy will do anything to prevent us from executing our plan, so we have to be ready before the shield over this place fizzles out.”
The group got up and took collective action. Every component of the work machine seemed to know what to do, where to go and how to do it without instruction. People were picking up tools, lugging weapons and supplies back upstairs. They were alone in the hallway after minutes of them waking up.
Greg stayed behind. He said to Vic and Jimmy, “Follow me. The way down is complicated. And keep in
mind, we’re not coming back up. Our work is down below.”
“What is this building?” Vic asked Greg, seeing that Jimmy was petrified. Jimmy carried the other end of the chest and stayed quiet. “I see offices, but I couldn’t view the outside. Everything’s obliterated.”
“There’s nine floors to this building. All nine floors with windows that can be breached. These newer buildings were built cheaply, but that’s working for us too, seeing that we can modify it so easily. This building is actually a hub for a movie company. The part we’re at now is the business part, and the higher levels are movie sets, editing rooms, etc.”
“What movie company? In New Jersey?” Jimmy came to life again. The talk of movies always got a rise out of him. “Who makes movies here?”
“Um, well, not movies in the classic sense.”
Vic already knew what he was hinting at. “You’re talking about porno movies.”
Greg gave a sly grin. “Yeah, or as my dad would’ve called them, ‘pussy films’. The guy who owns the company is going to meet us below, but I’ll warm you, he’s dead.”
“Won’t he melt?” Jimmy asked.
Greg sighed. “Some of them melt, some don’t until later, depending on how much soul energy.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Vic said. “So where are we going with this chest? Let’s get there and talk about it then. I’m tired of lugging this heavy bitch around.”
“Fair enough.”
Greg pointed back to the emergency stairs. They trudged down another floor. They entered a strange boiler room. Rusted pipes, a raging furnace, rooms with cleaning supplies and janitorial offices, were spread out among winding halls.
Vic’s body tensed. “What the fuck is this scary looking shit?”
“No, it’s not what you think. It’s supposed to trick you. The guy who runs this movie company, he refers to himself as Knob Rogers. He’s been in the smut industry since the ’70s. He’s a master at getting other people to fund his projects. I’m saying this because this building used to be full of corporate offices. Rich lawyer types, some of which, who love Knob’s porno. But this building was designed by a set of weirdo rich people. It’s why the dead sent us to this building. There’s sub-levels, secret places to hide. It’s a labyrinth of hidey holes. There’s an access to the secret sub-levels down here. I’ll go first if you don’t trust me.”
Vic thought it over and remained skeptical. The story was wild. A porno king, a building with secret nooks designed by rich people, it was a bit too farfetched. The whole situation was out of the realm of sense and reasoning.
So why would this make any more sense?
Vic eyed the .22 the whole time since he met Greg. “You give me the gun, you take the other end of this chest and you tell me where to go, and I’ll check it out first. That’s the deal. Non-negotiable, and time’s ticking.”
Greg had no problem accepting the request, though when he handed the gun to him, he muttered, “You better be careful where you point that thing. Everybody’s jittery and accidents happen.”
Vic didn’t say anything. Let the guy sweat, he thought. Vic let the two carry the chest ahead of him. He felt like the warden in a work prison camp. Down the first hall, the lights were a weak orange. The background filled with boiler room’s churning. Another hall, they entered a janitor’s office. The square room had a desk, a computer and a set of file cabinets (what janitor needed file cabinets, he wondered).
Greg said, “You see that nudie calendar on the wall?”
Vic saw the calendar. The woman was on her knees planting petunias in her backyard with only a red mini-skirt and no top. She was a wild brunette with flowing hair that fell just right over her breasts, the strands covering the nipples.
Tasteful.
“Behind that calendar is a key code panel. I have the password.”
Vic wasn’t buying it. “Put down the chest. You do the password. How do I know something won’t cut my head off when I press it?”
“You don’t.” Greg jointly set the chest down with Jimmy, stepped around Vic and lifted back the calendar to the panel behind it. It was a key pad of numbers. Greg dialed the numbers. The wall behind Vic clicked. A lock was unlatched. A hidden door opened a quarter of an inch.
Greg walked to it, opened it and revealed a short access that eventually stopped at an elevator. A single light on the ceiling cast its glow on the steel front. It promised many things, the mystery of it causing Vic’s imagination to run wild.
He asked Jimmy, “What do you think?”
“We’ve gone this far,” Jimmy said so softly Vic barely heard him. “Why not see it through to the end? My father pointed me in this direction. I trust him.”
“Okay,” Vic said. “I guess I’ve got the gun. If anything happens.” He didn’t care that Greg could hear his every word. “I’m still not sure about this whole porno guy business. Besides that calendar, I haven’t seen anything vaguely pornographic. And believe me, I would’ve noticed.”
Greg winked at them when he pressed the elevator’s button. “You’ll see what you’re looking for, buddy. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The elevator door opened. Vic clutched the .22 ready to throw back the trigger. His eagerness turned into a question mark. The elevator was empty. The walls were made of cushy pink velvet pillows.
“Hmmmm,” Vic grumbled. “Interesting.”
Greg walked with Jimmy into the elevator. “Come on, we’re wasting time. Once we get down there, you’ll meet Knob Rogers.”
Vic stayed to the side of Greg and watched him hit the only button on the wall beside the emergency stop button. After the doors shut, the speakers in the ceiling played a woman moaning on the way to a good orgasm.
Jimmy eyed them both sheepishly.
Vic couldn’t help but laugh. “Kind of awkward, huh, fellas?”
Greg laughed too. “Knob Rogers’s the dirtiest man of them all. If you cut off his hands, he’d find a way to whack off using the stumps.”
The elevator was going down farther than one floor. Vic snapped back into guarded mode. “Hey, where are we going?”
“It’s a few floors down. It’s a secret access. Rich people rent out fallout shelters below here. When there wasn’t any nuclear attacks back when they built them, they hired Knob Rogers to rent them out for high-end escort services. He also likes to shoot some of his flicks down here too. People pay to be on the sidelines of his fuck films. It gets their juices going. I don’t care what people say. People like to watch people bang.”
The elevator dinged.
Then the doors opened.
The first section Greg ushered them through was a passage of lavish looking rooms. Expensive beds with plush bedding. Big screen TVs. Mini-bars in every room. Cabinets of sex toys. Movie posters graced the walls in expensive frames, most of it smut ranging from the 70s to the present, a few sticking in Vic’s mind: Mr. Peter’s Adventure in Skin Land and Debbie Does Dallas.
Jimmy was entranced by the naked female flesh displayed on the walls.
“Get your tongue back in your mouth,” Vic said to Jimmy. “I want to know why we’re down here, and those other people are busting their asses up there? I’m not here to get the grand tour. I want answers.”
Greg waved them onward. “You’ll get them. We’re almost there.”
The sex rooms ended, and they walked through another door to a small kitchen. The place had room service. Beyond that were shelves stocked with beer, wine and hard liquors.
“It’s down the way. Almost there.”
They ended up going down two floors of stairs, and then they entered a large foyer. A theatre concession set-up faced them, featuring two popcorn machines and candy behind glass displays. The place had dimmed lighting. Nobody was working. Behind the stand was the entrance into the only theatre. The sound of
work echoed from within. The banging hammers, mostly. Vic entered to see two dozen people gutting the seating arrangements. The seats were cleared, leaving torn up dark red carpet and loose screws and nails. The theatre’s screen was blank at the head of the room.
“Who is this guy?” Vic asked. “He’s got places to bop hookers and a nice theatre to watch movies.”
Greg said, “Knob Rogers also makes low budget movies. His company does just about anything. The fuck films are his bread and butter. He watches everything before he releases it on the screen to make sure it’s up to his standard, since he produces the movies.”
Jimmy couldn’t hold the chest any longer, so he and Greg set it down. “So what do we do here?”
The people working added haste to their action. Their arrival meant time was short to finalize their plans. From behind them, another set of people carried in what looked like big briefcases. Vic counted twenty of them. He gasped when he caught the last man entering the room, a man in his sixties with white hair styled in a ponytail, sizeable beer gut, with blue flesh. The man was dead.
That had to be Knob Rogers.
Greg introduced the corpse to the both of them. “This is Knob Rogers.”
“Wait, how did you die?” Vic had to know.
Knob’s voice was without affectation, his vocal cords stiff. He pointed at the swollen purple rash ring around his neck. “I woke up in someone’s backyard hanging by the neck on a clothesline with five other dead people beside me. Then I come back to life, but I’m dead, you see, and a bunch of corpses direct me back to my building, and here we are. We’ve all been waiting for you and that chest.”
Vic asked, “So what’s in the chest? I’m dying to know.”
Knob Rogers pointed at it. “Only one way to find out. Shall we open it and get this show on the road?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
