by Alan Spencer
POP.
POP.
POP.
POP.
One person in front of her remained until it was Penny’s turn to go POP.
Penny had one idea to save herself and only half a second to pull it off.
“Why are you killing all of these innocent people?” Vic challenged his father, The Splitter. “Why do the dead hate us so much?”
His father didn’t want to talk. An axe the size Paul Bunyan would use swung down. Vic performed an awkward cartwheel to avoid the dangerous weapon.
Jimmy appeared out of nowhere and opened fire with an M-16 covered in flesh and blood. The Splitter took the bullet damage and laughed as clothing tatters and blood dripped down his body.
“I’m much stronger than the others. Bullets won’t kill me. NOTHING will.”
His father rammed the axe handle into Jimmy’s stomach. Jimmy shot across the room and struck the wall. When he hit the ground, Jimmy didn’t get back up.
“Jimmy!”
Another swing, the axe was a hair from taking off Vic’s nose. Reacting to the close call, Vic launched back his fist like a catapult about to launch its payload. Striking the logger in the face, hearing bones break in his sinus cavity, The Splitter faltered with red gushing out both nostrils.
“I taught you everything you knew, Vic, including how to fight. I raised you to be a man, to do the right thing.”
“You never did the right thing, Dad. You’re a murderer. You murdered criminals because you’re fucking psychotic. I don’t even know the half of how you hurt people. You abused me, and you abused Mom. You got respect from people’s fear. That’s not respect at all. That’s just bullshit!”
“Yeah, I’m a murderer,” the villain boasted. “Things must be done to serve and protect. I murdered over fifty people. Mostly people in ghettos. Drug addicts, prostitutes, the scabs of the earth. I paid for my indiscretions on the other side. The dead never die. Our sins never fade. The afterlife isn’t one person’s hell, it’s billions of people’s hells. I’ve lived the torments of billions and billions of lost, tortured souls. If I have to live out this horrible sentence, so should the living.”
“You’re not talking sense. Your brain is rotten. You’re completely gone. Now are you going to keep swinging that axe at me, or are you going to fight me man-to-man?”
His father threw aside the axe.
The hulking man tightened his fists and came after Vic swinging.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Jimmy was coughing up blood. His stomach muscles were in agony. Every part of him was stunned. He couldn’t get up, only watch as the people around him fired weapons at new enemies. These weren’t the horror movie villains on the attack. He caught decay-fleshed corpses taunt the living. Loved ones, children and friends were joining in the battle. Some dead people coerced the living to put their guns into their mouths and pull the trigger. A few even slit their own throats. He was surrounded by dead people laying in pools of blood. The reels still played in the theatre. Vic was fighting the movie character he recognized as The Splitter, but they were talking like father and son.
He had to help Vic survive. The blow to the belly had slowed him down. But he also had to guard the reels.
Jimmy did the only thing he could do.
Penny bit down on the cord of intestine. Her teeth clacked together. She bit through it, tasting nasty bile spill into her mouth. She was dropped onto the floor, released moments before facing the barrel-chested, bulging bellied man whose intestines uncoiled from his belly button unending. He was angry seeing her drop to the floor and escape. He was about to shoot out his guts at her again when the floor collapsed beneath her.
Her butt hit a steel slide. The odd angle shot her downward, hurtling her forward fast. The surface was slick with the blood of many victims, thick as paint and slippery as butter. Shooting forward, her body was like a plow, shoving aside bits and pieces of people and monsters: a hand, a crab claw, a head that belonged to a crow the size of a human’s, a reptilian tail and the torso of a caveman with a leopard sash across the front. The mess of gore was so diced up, the farther she slid downward, the harder to tell what else had fallen down here and met a grisly demise. Kinetic energy increased the speed of her death. Penny saw the end of the slide just up ahead. It fed into a row of saw blades the size of car tires. A half dozen were inches apart, spinning, bragging of razor sharp edges that could strip her flesh down to the bone and dismantle her. She’d be reduced to hamburger instantly.
Thinking fast, Penny pressed her palms against the walls and wedged her foot against the tunnel. The surface being slippery, she kept moving, but her downward fall slowed. The blades were so close. Spinning, and slicing, and ready to turn her into many colors of splatter, Penny prayed she stopped herself before her body was pitched into certain death.
It had been years since Vic had himself a real good fist fight. Vic’s security job outside the strip club allowed him to clean up a few horny drunks now and again. Those fights were easy. The drunkards would take a shot to the chin and belly and think they’d taken a full nine rounds with Mike Tyson.
But he wasn’t trading blows with drunks.
The Splitter was a good seven feet tall and three hundred pounds of pure muscle. Each swing Vic dodged was like avoiding colliding with the meat of a concrete bat. The logger’s face didn’t match his father’s features, though they were twisted into rage like his old man’s. His father slipped from being in character to being himself repeatedly. “SPLIT YOU IN TWO! You might juke fast, but one hit’s all it will take to end your life. Quit moving, Victor! Stay still!”
Vic ducked low, bending down, and delivered three quick jabs to the logger’s gut. It was like hitting a sack of concrete. His fist throbbed. Maybe he’d broken a few fingers. The enemy remained unfazed.
Stepping side-to-side, performing circles around the thick logger who had trouble turning in rhythm to Vic’s step, the strategy allowed Vic to kick the logger behind the knees, though it didn’t knock him down.
“Your family is dead, Victor. They died in pieces! There wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. Just like there isn’t a fucking thing you can do to save yourself. Nothing to save the world! We shall send the living to damnation!”
Vic landed a strong punch to the logger’s jaw. It was his biggest mistake. Vic’s anger had opened him up for his father to take advantage of his position. Landing home like a hundred pound hammer, his father’s fist struck him. Split his lip. Shell shocked his skull. Whip-lashes of white hot pain radiated in his brain. Blood trickled out his mouth and ears. He collided into a wall. Laying on his side, Vic couldn’t dream of getting back up.
The shadow of his father towered over him. His meaty hands extended to grapple Vic’s neck and finish the job of killing him.
Vic could only let it happen.
Impossibly heavy, Jimmy used every ounce of strength to lift the axe up off the ground, while The Splitter closed in on Vic.
Just like in the movie, Jimmy thought. Just like what I saw in the movie…
The cycle of saw blades sounded like a collection of amplified dentist’s drill. Blades to sheer her flesh. Blades to end her existence. Or would her remains live on? Would Penny see hell? Be tortured by the same dead monsters who used the horror movies to murder just about everyone in the world?
Penny cried out in joy when she stopped her descent. The muscles in her arms and legs trembled. They could give any moment and pitch herself into those blades that were only five yards out from her body.
What to do now?
She couldn’t climb back up. The journey was too high. Her arms and legs were seconds from giving in.
And another problem.
Rats with steel teeth were incoming. They had mechanical mouths and red eyes like the taillights of a car. They were shredding through the walls, rendering lengths of wood into sawdust at a
larming speeds.
The effort was all in the name of reaching Penny.
Every breath was clotted with blood, mucous and pain. Vic tried to lift himself up off the ground, but only one armed seemed to work. Syrupy blood trickled down the entire length of his body. He was the very definition of battered.
He heard his father’s fists tighten, like rope being stretched taught.
The fists would come down at any moment and finish him.
Maybe it was from long term exhaustion. No real sleep for days. Or it could be the constant brushes with death that jilted his thought process.
Jimmy remembered the film called The Splitter.
And how the logger met his demise.
If only he could force new strength into his arms, he could just save Vic…if only he had the strength.
The rats proved to be her friends.
Using one hand, Penny grabbed each of the lunging rats and pitched them into the saw blades. They erupted upon contact. As her feet wanted to give, Penny grabbed hold of an exposed pipe. Shifting her weight, she slipped through to the other side of the wall where the rats had eaten through, only to tip forward and plunge helplessly into a strange and unknown darkness.
Vic’s life flashed before his eyes. How his two little girls had died. How he’d allowed a marriage to fail. How his father’s violence became his own violence.
You’re not your father.
You see your faults.
It doesn’t matter now.
Now he’s going to kill you.
Who was he kidding? Vic was nothing against the logger. He watched the monster’s fists bunch together to shape a hammer. His father was hell bent on ending his life.
The son-of-a-bitch would have his wish.
“It’s time to retire this axe!”
Steel severed through bones. Vic heard the breaking of a spine. The peals of agony from his father. His voice was mangled and distorted by an unreal pain. The logger’s body split down the middle and came open, the flesh blackened and worms spilling out of the busy corpse. His father hit the ground and turned into ash. The dust floated up high. Particle by particle, the man faded until he was gone.
Jimmy threw aside the logger’s axe and extended his hand to Vic and helped him off the ground to his feet.
Then they turned around to face what else was in the room with them.
Empty air slipped through Penny’s body. Falling faster into nothing. The rush hit her body with stone cold fear. One moment stretched on for many as she plummeted lower and lower into the black unknown. Tilting forward as if to suffer a header, her body plunged deeper down without landing.
Then from below her, “Son-of-a-bitch, not more of those things!”
Then Penny’s body landed on something soft, though her knee connected against something with a bone-jarring clang.
She had landed on a person.
The person who got knocked down was pissed off. “What the hell kind of monster are you? Want to meet my good friend Mr. Glock? Come on over. We’ll have a nice meet and greet. The after party will be in hell!”
Penny, still getting her bearings, asked, “Mr. Who? Look, don’t shoot!”
A light was shone in her face. A man gasped. “Oh God, you’re a survivor. I about shot you. By the time the shell casing would’ve hit the ground, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Thank God I didn’t shoot you. I’m so sorry. My name’s Billy Carton.”
“I’m Penny Baxter.”
Penny had landed on a man of strong build with a dark grit stubble for facial hair and a face cast in sadness, yet also harboring a solid determination. He wore a backpack, clutched a handgun in one hand, and was about to open the top of an elevator hatch. He wore a sweat and blood covered T-shirt with the Superman logo on it and torn up jeans.
“The monsters are coming. They’re above us.” Penny heard the constant sounds of gunfire and cries of bodily harm ring out. “We have to move, but I don’t know where it’s safe.”
“Nowhere is safe,” Billy said. “The elevator’s the place we need to be. I know the code.”
“What code?”
“To get us to the sub-level, of course. My wife told me that’s where I needed to be. I mean, she told me this after she died and came back to life. Cindy said down there is where the battle will be won or lost. I’m not losing. I’ve lost too much already. I’ve survived this shit once, I’ll survive it again.”
Penny’s head was warring with a migraine. Billy was speaking nonsense. Everybody was talking nonsense. That made her think she was with the right person. He wasn’t from a movie. He wasn’t trying to kill her.
“You’ve survived this before? When else did this happen?”
“Back in Chicago about three months ago. The whole city was attacked by B-movies. I lost my best friend there. I almost lost my wife during this shit. Shank Back got her on the way to New Jersey.”
“Shank Back?”
“Some kind of wart hog. Forget it. Doesn’t matter. Before she died, she told me to take my delivery here. Down in this elevator, I punch in the numbers, and we’ll be on the frontlines of the war. This is where it goes down for humanity. I know, don’t ask me how it’s supposed to make any kind of sense. There are crippling gaps of logic in everything around us.”
Up above them, the walls were beginning to splinter. Things were chewing, hacking and pummeling their way down toward them.
“No time to be afraid,” Billy said. “It’s time to fight back and pray we live long enough to make a real difference.”
Billy opened the metal hatch into the elevator. He helped her down first and was right behind her.
When Penny touched down, she was shocked by what was in the elevator with her. She shrank against the wall and broke down into tears.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
One by one, monsters materialized out of thin air outside the theatre. From the hallway leading into the lobby, the swinging pendulum blades were dismantled. Cretins, serial killers, slashers, monsters and hundreds of enemies packed the area. Crab-clawed sea monsters stood side-by-side with rolling puffer fish whose spines fired from the body, aiming to impale. Vampires clutched onto old fashioned apple presses to grind down human organs, to sop the blood from meat. Brittle-boned, leather fleshed zombies trudged forward by the dozens with an arsenal of power tools in their hands, ready to split bodies in twain. An office supply worker clutched a stapler in one hand and a pencil with an eye ball skewered on the tip in the other. A plumber clutched a bloody wrench in one hand and a plunger heaped with worms of flesh dangling from the rubber end. Red drenched ballerinas carried chainsaws, revving them up as they performed graceful moves. Cannibal tribes pried open human torsos, spreading their rib cages wide and stuffing bell peppers and other spices inside before putting them over a spit to cook. What looked like meatballs with mouths hopped along, leaving a spatter of blood with each hop and landing they made. Eyeballs flew overhead owning dragonfly wings. Women bleeding from the eyes promised them the dead’s suffering would be their own. The villains kept piling in, too many to count and too many to comprehend. Doctors, surgeons and psychiatrists were lined up sharing anecdotes:
“He just lost his head!”
“No lawyer can keep his hands to himself!”
“Some people just don’t have a heart!”
“Her legs look better on your wife than they ever did on mine!”
“See you on the ninth hole, Charlie.”
Vic and Jimmy stood in front of the theatre door having no idea how to fight back against the army of villains. From behind them, they heard the sound of the movie reels suddenly stop.
Vic rushed into the theatre to find Mr. Ratchet, and a man in a trench coat with garden sheers and thick goggles, remove the movie reels from the projectors and snip them into pieces so fast they looked like snow.
>
Mr. Ratchet laughed in delight. “Looks like the first feature is over. Now it’s the main feature’s turn to impress the crowd.”
The walls went blank of the stock war footage.
Penny hid her face against Billy’s chest. She didn’t care if the man was a stranger. Her uncle lay dead, eviscerated, on the elevator’s floor. A younger man was laying in a pool of his own blood, his throat cut open by something that resembled talon slashes.
Billy opened the plastic tub that rested between the two corpses. He opened them to find a pile of reels.
“The dead on our side had a plan C. I’ll be damned.”
Penny couldn’t stop weeping. She was exhausted and weak, and now that she saw her uncle dead, it drained whatever fight she had remaining.
“Do you know these people?”
Penny nodded. “Yes, the older one’s my uncle. I don’t know the other guy.”
“They’re heroes. However they got here, the dead tried to help them. By now, they’ve dismantled the reels playing in the basement. They were playing war footage. It was defense against the monsters. On my way here, I saw various other buildings where people were shacked up. They too were playing reels.”
“I assume you’re planning to take these reels down there?”
“I guess that’s where we come in,” Billy said. “Our contribution to the great plan to save the world’s ass. Everybody has to keep up a solid front if we’re going to win. Everybody has a role in the war.”
“As do we.”
Penny gasped when her uncle spoke. Jules slowly got up, holding his intestines into his belly with one hand.
“We’re in this together, Billy,” Jules said. “Hit the button.”
Billy hit “6” on the panel. “Here goes everything.”
The elevator jolted, then it started to move.
“Don’t worry, Penny,” Jules consoled her. “This fight will be over soon. It’s our last chance. There isn’t time for apologies, but still, I’m so sorry I treated you so badly during the last few months. I let my personal problems take over the things that were important. I want you to be happy, Penny. You deserve it. My pretty Penny.”
