by Alan Spencer
I bet you do, Caleb thought.
Shannon was perturbed after being scared, slapping Chippie's arm and shouting, “What are you up to now? Jesus Christ, Chippie, what’s wrong with you? You scared us both!”
The man's eyes enlarged and he said nothing. He listened to the woods. Then he said softly, “I’ll take you to my house. I can’t explain it here.”
“You’ve lost it.” She stayed rooted in place, even though Caleb perked at the chance of going to the man’s house. “You’re freaking me out."
“They’re here,” the man insisted, hushing her words. “And they’ll hear you. You’re lucky I found you when I did before you became one of them. They’re out to dominate the world and control us with their evil. Communist bastards won’t control me. I pay taxes. I have a right to protect my property, and my community. Blow them to shit, damn right—yes, sir, blow them out of their hidey-holes! Shove a stick of dynamite up their red China asses!"
Caleb tried to sort through the man's nonsense to reach the truth—something he'd never done in his normal line of work before. “Who’s taking over? I don't understand you. Slow down, Chip."
“You must arm yourselves. Follow me to safety or perish alone, it’s up to you. I’ll tell you what I know in my house. That’s the best I can do."
Chippie marched through the woods, his mind already made up. Caleb stared at Shannon, a pleading look drawn on his features. “This is our chance to see inside his place. How about it?"
She refused. “He’s crazy, but he’s acting different this time. It’s not funny. It's scary."
He disagreed, knowing this was his best chance to get another story, and to say "no" now would forever revoke his chance at the deeper truth. He would plunge into the mind, into the world, of Chippie Douglas.
“Okay, he’s wired and set to blow, but we’re not his prime target. His eyes are locked dead ahead. He wants to protect us.” He followed Chippie, urging her to join forces with him. “You can go or not, I understand your argument, but I can’t pass this up.”
She knew she was making the wrong decision. “If something bad happens, I’m blaming you.”
“Then blame me. I’ll give you another two hundred dollars for this. This will get me a promotion, hell, an award! I always wanted to be a legitimate reporter. Now, I might get the chance. Diane Sawyer, you better watch out. I'll be like one of those hardnosed TV reporters who stick it to wrongdoers. Man, I’d take that job in a heartbeat.”
“Keep to the path,” Chippie directed them. "It's risky venturing out; take my word for it. And keep it down. They’re not that far away. I know they're here somewhere close by."
What “risky” meant soon became clear, and he took pictures of everything he observed, his ambitions somehow overcoming his fear. Bear traps hung from every other tree, the shadows carving them up as metallic jaws of death. Higher in the trees, logs carved to points were suspended by ropes. His naked eye happened upon the bronze disk on the ground beneath clumps of grass and leaves: a land mine. Pitfalls were draped in green tarps peppered with local debris. Trip lines were set between random trees, rigging unknown traps.
“I knew it." She lowered her voice to a whisper. “One day Chippie would finally lose it. Drunken target practice isn’t enough for him. We have to call the police.”
“Has he ever hurt anybody before?”
“Not that I know of, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t. I’m sure it’s not that hard to hide a body around here. Miles of empty space, there’s so many nooks and holes to chose from. But if somebody walks on a landmine on accident, it’ll be his fault. And the bear traps, holy shit!”
“I still want to know what set him off. Something’s stirred him up good.”
“Chippie was on the warpath since 9/11. He posted pro-war signs and gave away American flags, bumper stickers, and George Bush drink coasters. The man urged people to buy canned goods and bottled water and to arm themselves. Things calmed down after a time, but Chippie hasn’t, though I thought he’d lightened up a bit. I was wrong.”
They closed in on the man’s house.
“Stay behind me,” Chippie warned them again. “Any wrong step, and you're going home in a plastic bag."
He regretted his decision to follow the story, though now, he was too far in to take it back. Investigative reporters pitted themselves against child predators, convicts, and tornadoes, but now, he wasn't so sure he was ready for that brand of journalism. Maybe he was content sticking with alien probings and bat boys.
He tried his cell phone to notify the police, but it didn’t get a signal and the battery was too low. He’d forgotten to charge it during last night’s fun. “Shit.”
She sensed his apprehension and locked arms with him for comfort. “Like it or not, I guess we’re going into the man’s house."
25
“Look at these bodies, there’s so many—we’re cooped up with fetid corpses, and I'm sick of it!” Frank Henagar lost it, tipping over a shelf of books in anger. After the crash, he bounded into the living area, kicking over the wide screen TV and shattering the front. He then stormed into the disposal room heaped full of a hundred plus bodies. Frank dug through them, picking up random and sunken corpses and throwing them back down with cold smacks of soft skin against concrete. “What have we become? We’ve accomplished nothing—nothing! The walls seem to edge closer and closer everyday, and I can’t stand it! I won’t do this. Not—for—one—more—minute!”
Ruden was at his work table in the disposal room taking stock of the number of corpses and the amount of blood they’d stored in wooden casks when Frank’s breakdown interrupted his train of thought.
“You can’t talk me out of it! I’m leaving!”
Dr. Stone entered the room before Ruden could intervene, approaching Frank only be to punched directly in the face. The blow knocked him back onto a coffee table. Before he could get up, Hector tackled Frank, using his weight as the leverage to force him down onto the floor. Frank blathered on the way down, his head bent strangely as he were battling impossible emotions, “They’ll find out what we’ve done—they know, they know we’ve wasted time. They know we’ve failed! I sense their displeasure. They grow weary of waiting. They’ve given up.” Foam collected at his lips, his throat bulging with so many veins. “They’ll come here, and they’ll see these bodies, these women we’ve turned into vile whores, and they’ll know we haven’t come up with anything!”
In a wild display of energy, Frank shrugged Hector off his back, and rushed back into the disposal room. Once inside, he pointed at the many corpses. “Another woman, another woman, another whore, another slut, another dead hooker, another dead bitch—and look, they’re still full of blood. Blood we didn’t use for anything scientific!”
Ruden subdued the troubled man. “That's where you're wrong, my friend. We will use the blood.” Then Ruden lunged at Frank. Catching him off-guard and trapping him in a full-nelson, Ruden directed his team, "Grab his legs, he’s finished—he’s done!"
“I want no part of this anymore,” Frank shouted, biting into Ruden’s shoulder with a mutt's growl. “Raaaaaaaaah!”
Ruden fought the horrible pain of teeth breaking his flesh to drag the man into the very back of the disposal room where three dozen rows of wooden casks stood. Dr. Stone worked fast to claim Frank's feet, and Hector awaited Ruden's instruction, staring at the scene unfolding with horror on his face.
“Open that cask." He worked with Dr. Stone to bring the flailing madman to the back of the room. “Let him see how we will use the blood.”
“What are you saying?” Dr. Stone insisted, foreseeing his idea. “We can’t kill him. We can't. We need him.”
“But we have to kill him. He’ll go to the surface and tell them things. They won’t understand our work. Only we do. They should only care about the end result, but if he gets his way, there shall be no end result. Do you want that? Why did you sign on if you didn't believe in what we were doing?"
Hecto
r took hold of Frank when Dr. Stone backed off. He was shaking his head, second-guessing Ruden’s decision. “I can’t do this. I'm sorry. You're going to have to do it yourself."
“Fine; Hector, grab him!"
Ruden had control now, and with Hector's assistance, he plunged Frank into the cask of blood face-first. Together, they pinned his legs to prevent him from thrashing. Drowning with bubbles building at the surface, Frank put up a good fight until four minutes passed, and his body finally went still. Ruden left him in the barrel dead, and then he turned to Dr. Stone.
“We had to do that, don’t you see? They’ll never understand the scope of our research. Until we have the answer, this information must be kept a secret.”
Dr. Stone remained slumped against the wall in the corner in silence, horrified and aghast at what his fellow researchers had committed. The doctor knew it was only the beginning of what it would take to reach their final blood solution.
26
The pit was lined with wet concrete due to Dale's efforts. It would take time to dry, but that concern didn’t match the spectacle that surrounded them. Jenny Patrick had returned with a dozen bodies, including those of her husband and two children. Ruden, Lenora, and Sheriff Graham arrived in a bus and lugged in hundreds of corpses in front of the conveyor belt, piling them chest-high. The three hurried to the task of sending the remains down the conveyor line, the once playful act now a serious job.
Clump! Shrick! Ka-crunk! Ka-crunk!
The two sheets of metal pounded together, constantly rendering bone into brittle pieces. Blood flowed, trickling at an incredible torrent and filling up the concrete reservoir.
“You’re not like them,” Ruden addressed Dale amidst the work effort. “Calm, that’s what I like about you. You’re sensible despite the blood's power; it’s quite overwhelming if you let it overtake you. You're changing rapidly; you're unrecognizable compared to the first time I saw you. Keep up your good work because I've got big plans for you."
He wasn’t sure how to reply, so he kept watching the scene around him as new events took place.
Vehicles tore up the path and parked outside the cider mill. The back mill doors were removed from the hinges by the strangers outside. Men, women, and children, all of them bloodthirsty, their faces like human mosquitoes, lined up to unload their corpse cargo onto the ever-growing hill of death. Soon, nobody couldn’t take a step forwards or backwards without kicking aside a severed head, stamping through a puddle of red, or almost slipping through a pile of entrails.
He counted sixty fiends total, including himself.
“This is all that’s left of our kind,” Ruden continued talking to him as he beheld his creed proudly. “We have our own history, Dale. The bloodthirsty migrated to America for a better life. Manifest Destiny, Pilgrim’s Progress, Indian massacres, the American Revolution, our ancestors were there for all of it, sucking the blood from both sides of the killing floor. It was so easy when we weren’t deformed. We could blend in and supp blood at will. It happened in the last decade, our deformations. Either our blood has changed or our bodies are advancing after years of goring on the life blood. I couldn't master why it happened; that's one of the biggest regrets out of my research.
"But now we're going to prosper, and this is the best place for us from a blood standpoint, being in America. The United States’ population keeps growing, and it will keep growing for years to come. It's been hard hiding from them—our food, I mean. It'd be like a farmer terrified of his chickens, the bastard worried if they'd rise up against him when he was the one with the axe in his hand ready to behead them. There was no way to promote our situation until now, until my new idea. It took years, but damn it, it's going to be accomplished. This blood is our answer once it's prepared and finalized. We'll no longer be the freaks clinging to the shadows. The blood I spit into your mouth and the mouths of others was from those barrels, and what’s in those barrels we’ll manufacture. Those who are enslaved will only have a taste; we can’t have everybody as powerful and as strong as we are, isn’t that right?”
What Dale really wanted to know: "How did you create this blood? What's so special about it?”
Ruden smiled at his inquisitive helper. “It’s simple, and tonight, your question will be answered.”
He caught Annie hacking corpses into smaller pieces with an axe, and then decapitating four in a row without losing a beat. She grinned in delight watching the stumps exude their contents like weak fountains, burbling up.
Ruden finalized the conversation. “I must begin setting up roadblocks. We’ll create detours that steer people away from our main base. The sheriff’s men are scouting the area for anybody hiding. In the meantime, oversee this mess for me, Dale.” He placed his hand on his shoulder. “I’m trusting you.”
He accepted the challenge. “Of course.”
Ruden claimed Lenora from her play; she held a severed head in each hand, and then she piked them on the conveyor’s blades with gusto.
“Put down those heads! We've got things to finish before we have too much fun yet."
She obeyed him, the two filing out of the crowd and exiting the cider mill with purpose. The overwhelming din of dismantling bodies drove Dale to seek a break. He didn't belong here despite his condition and the growing need for Ruden's blood. The only part of the property not occupied by the bloodthirsty was his house next door.
He slipped out the back exit, and once in his house, he collapsed onto his knees in the living room. He stared at his family’s picture over the fireplace mantle. Margaret in her Sunday’s best and Annie and Bruce in their teenage years; the two had so much yet to experience, and now they were rendered into blood, forever gone and eternally consumed.
“God, what’s been done here,” he wept, catching the reflection of his bulbous eyes in a mirror over the mantle. He shielded his face from view and cowered into the bathroom. Another mirror displayed the monster he’d become, the sight berating him. He was no longer Dale Birchum, or even a man. His eyes were so swollen they’d cracked the bones that bordered his sockets. “This isn’t happening.” He pounded the sink fixture with his fists. “Damn you, Ruden!"
He stripped down to nothing, defeated and out of energy to resolve his frustrations. He turned on the shower. Stepping inside, the warm spray rolled down his body in pink trails. Steaming hot, he clawed and rinsed the evidence of murder from his skin.
The bathroom door swung open, and scared it was Ruden punishing him for quitting work, he was poised to do battle, but then Annie came into view behind the fogged glass. She stepped out of her sodden dress that made a splat when it landed on the floor.
She joined him.
He wasn’t bothered by her enlarged eyes or her vascular precise body. Her nipples were supple and firm, her breasts milky fat, her body pale and curvy—the culmination of traits creating an enticing package.
“I know what’s on your mind,” she beckoned to him, licking under his ear once. “Help yourself.”
He throbbed to the point he ejaculated onto her belly, but there was more to release—so much more! He thrust hard into her, her body pitted on his member. She swallowed him so deep, there was no end to her warm womb. The hole sucked him in, tightening to rend the semen in small luxurious amounts. She carved her nails into Dale’s shoulder and split open a series of veins. She sucked from the wounds, lapping up what spilled. He followed her actions by slicing his fingernails along her right breast and exposing the veins. Together, they sucked and swallowed and devoured, exchanging ounces of fluid and grinding so hard his hips and pelvis burned. It wasn’t until Annie shuttered and slowed her thrusts that he coated her canal in his orgasm.
“I could go forever if you wanted me to.”
“Me too." She was out of breath, resting her chin against his shoulder. “But we don’t have time. I didn’t come here just to play. I’m concerned. What did Ruden say to you?”
“He told me he’s going to set road blocks and find anyone else in
Smithville that are hiding."
She nuzzled her face against his. “Did he tell you anything else?”
“Those that just arrived are others like him. Their mutated appearance has caused their hunt for blood to become near impossible. They can't go out in public freely. That’s why Ruden hid in that wishing well for so long to create a solution to their blood problem. I guess the blood finally changed them, and they haven't been able to remedy the mutation.” He whispered in her ear, “The blood in those barrels was his final answer. What he meant by that, I'm not absolutely certain."
“Do you have any guesses about what makes it so Goddamn good?”
“Maybe it’s a serum or drug.” He pondered the notion of tainted blood, but there was nothing Ruden had brought into the cider mill that indicated the use of drugs or chemicals. “I can't say for sure, but Ruden promised he’d reveal the secret tonight. He said there’d be a celebration.”
Her face bent into a menacing mask. “Don’t you see how much blood they’ve collected? It has to be hundreds of gallons, if not more. Split that between two people, and you’ve got a lifetime supply."
“You’re suggesting we murder them. Have you forgotten how strong they are? Sure, we pummeled those idiots for the cement earlier without breaking a sweat, but these creatures have been this way for years. How do we stand a chance against them?—just the two of us?"
She realized the snag in her plan. “I don’t know how to kill them, but you said so yourself they’re not immortal. We’ll think of something.”
“It’ll have to be by tonight when they’re together in one place.”
She seized his hands and forced him to cup her breasts. “We can be together forever. We’re the perfect compliments of each other. Imagine this for the rest of our lives. They could lock us up, and we’ll break through the walls. Nobody can contain us.”
“But we can die, don’t forget that.”
