by Alan Spencer
“The solution was obvious for Ruden after years of useless tinkering. We failed many times. He invented a mechanical heart that produced blood. The blood was synthetic tasting, and it turned the stomach into a boiling pit of acid and killed those who were called upon to first drink it. We had many human victims die that way, unfortunately; they were our guinea pigs. Ruden also created powder to mimic blood; just mix with water, and instant blood, but again, the results were disastrous. It ate through the body like acid and killed the consumer. Ruden kept five of us as assistants. The man was a phlebotomist, and he used biochemists and engineers like me to come up with a viable solution to our problem. Together, we’d collect specimens to keep our thirst fed and others we used to test out our ideas. Over three years later, Ruden comes up with a solution. I'm weary just remembering all the time we spent working on ideas that didn't go anywhere."
He listened as the victim continued talking. The man explained how he assisted in Ruden’s studies, how they cured their need for blood, how he ended up a torso, and Caleb was revolted at Ruden’s new plan—his real plan—and the treachery attached to it.
Before he could say anything else, the door from behind him was kicked open, bursting from its hinges. Then a form plowed aside Caleb, and he was sent flailing into the casks.
"How dare you tell him everything, Hector!"
Hector’s nervous screams filled the room as he was choked. “No—naaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
Caleb landed on the floor, in between two casks, clutching his ribs where he’d struck a table leg. He turned around in time to witness the hulking form twist the man’s head off. The man squeezed the head into pulp, crushing the skull and then spiking the deflated head onto the ground. The creature cackled, licking his fingers clean of brains and blood. “I see he was about to tell you the secrets of our blood. He’s already told you our history. I could hear Hector's thoughts from the woods. I knew something was going on in here, and I was right. You’ve seen too much, whoever you are. Now you’re going to have to die. Hector told you about his friend, Ruden, didn't he?"
A hand clenched Caleb’s throat. The creature lifted him up off the ground. Squeezing harder, the monster rasped into his cowering face, “Hector was telling you about me.”
38
Dale wasn’t certain where Ruden and Lenora had disappeared to, and he didn’t care. Crowds of the monsters bustled into the cider mill chattering and relaxing among the crimson spattered hay bales. Others rested on overturned baskets or their backs were up against the stock tanks. Cigarettes were smoked. Wine was toasted, corks popping randomly. Kisses and caresses were exchanged, lovers embracing each other after years of toil and failure. Concern was met with jubilation as Dale listened to random bits of conversation:
“Can you imagine how it will be when we take over the world?”
“This isn’t normal blood, something’s different. It’s enhanced.”
“I can’t wait to taste it. The smell alone is ravishing.”
“Lenora is ravishing.”
“She's as much of a vixen as she used to be—a fucking pussycat.”
“Where is Ruden?"
"Yeah. Why hasn’t he shown up yet?”
“He’s keeping us waiting, again.”
“Nothing new.”
“I’d like to bathe in that red hole. I’ve never seen so much blood in one place, ever.”
“Vlad the Impaler saw more blood in his day.”
“Bathory fucked in more.”
“Maybe the blood’s not for us.”
“What the fuck else could it be for?”
“Yeah, are we supposed to admire it? Frame it in a canvas?”
“How much longer do you think before someone alerts the authorities?”
“They’d have to pass the roadblocks. They’re pretty sturdy. Deputy Kiernan and others set up the barriers and false detour signs. We have a short time to enjoy ourselves—so let’s enjoy ourselves already.”
“Keep out signs? Roadblocks? Yeah, I’m sure that’ll deter everyone. People will mind their business with a damn sign. Any second, someone will be here.”
“It’s a quick fix. We'll kill them like the others.”
“Then what are we supposed to do with the blood? Where’s it going?”
“In our bodies.”
“Ruden’s a man of science. He didn’t have us murder Smithville for a simple party.”
“How are we supposed to transport the blood from that pit?”
“Maybe this is for recreational purposes.”
“I’m not so sure, knowing Ruden.”
Dale interrupted two women, each in their teens—youth maintained by the blood, not actually teenagers in age. Two pairs of brilliant Abyssinian eyes sized him up. Their heads were shaved to the skin. A chain link piercing was notched into their ear and reconnected to their noses. They were tattooed on their scalps, between their breasts—their thin tube tops and cut off shorts revealing their ink: dozens of faces: random men, women, and children.
The two noticed him staring at the tats, and one spoke, “Admiring our skin?”
“Why faces? The tattoos themselves don’t bother me.” He lifted up the sleeve of his shirt and revealed a black cross. “Mom made me get it to prove that I’d have something religious in my life when I left the house.”
The other girl finally fielded his question, her name being Brandy, the other Erin. “They’re the faces of those whose blood tasted the best.” She pointed to a man taking a nap between the pile of severed heads. “That’s Andrew—Andy. He was turned onto the blood thirst during the seventies. Our friends burned panties on campus and totted anti-war poster boards, and we tripped out on LSD. Andrew’s parents were blood drinkers for years, but he took us to a cabin in the woods, and while we were having a threesome, he spat the blood in our mouths. We weren’t as deformed back then, not like now. Things were so much easier back then. After we were turned, we made a pact to keep track of those who were murdered and the ones we enjoyed the most on our bodies, like an honorarium.”
“But once our bodies began to change physically,” Erin pointed at her eyes, “we became night owls and day hermits. We could look as crazy as we wanted.”
Dale appreciated the polite conversation, though it was no talk he’d share in his normal life. Digging deeper to find out what was on their minds, he asked the two girls about Ruden. “So what do you think about what Ruden’s cooked up?”
Brandy scoffed. “Who knows?” She lit a cigarette; she shared it with her friend after one toke. “The blood we’ve collected is promising. It means something.”
Erin smiled, her eyes falling on the hole of blood and staying there. “Blood’s always turned me on.”
He resisted the urge to smile, realizing he wasn’t getting any pertinent facts from the girls. “Hey, thanks for talking to me."
After walking away from them, Annie’s voice broke into his head. It was jarring and sudden, nearly sending him buckling to his knees in migraine.
Meet me in the apple nursery now.
He didn’t mean to speak aloud. “Where’ve you been?”
Hush. Take one of the barrels with you. Roll it out of the place. They won’t pay attention to you. I’ll be waiting. I have something special to share with you.
Ruden penetrated his mind from the start of this morbid affair, and now Annie had the ability to speak to him mentally.
What had changed?
Hurry!
He shuffled through the listless crowd to the back wall, searching for the barrel that had been relocated to the back entrance. It was covered in gore, random entrails mostly, and he had to fish them aside to take grip. He checked nobody was noticing him, the group entranced on the pit of sparkling blood. Confident he wouldn’t be followed, he rolled it out the door, taking route through the apple nursery. Dale’s night vision kicked in, but he couldn’t find Annie.
“Where are you?”
Keep walking.
He stopped rolling t
he barrel after spotting what flapped against a nearby apple tree. Grooves for eyes, nose, and ears, slits for fingers and toes, strands of hair flapping, it was a coat of human skin entangled in the branches. “What in…?”
I’m not hurt.
Come and see me.
He picked up the barrel to quicken his search. He stared at the outer layer of flesh as long as he could before he was too far away to view it. From above, Annie was crouched on a tree limb, perched like a jaguar. Moonlight touched her body, every inch glistening with exposed muscle tissue. She didn’t ooze or drip blood. Coagulated and clotted blood served as a protective wax-like coating; it cast a permanent sheen, like the gloss from a page of a magazine. Her teeth were revealed from a lipless mouth, the change forming a natural snarl. The orbs for eyes were completely revealed, triple the size of a human’s and forever ghastly. The veins were wrapped and piled and knotted upon each other.
“What’s happened to you?” He tripped over his words. “Y-you have no skin. You’ve...changed.”
She leaped from the tree and landed gracefully in front of him on both feet like an acrobat. “Touch me," she insisted.
He was hesitant to inch towards her. He pressed a finger against her clavicle muscle; it didn’t get wet, the clear sheath like plastic. He studied her breasts; they were stretched tight, the fat disappearing and replaced with the padding of muscle fibers. Smaller veins and arteries circulated, throbbing and beating to match her machine heart. He could see through her sternum, to the raging muscle beneath, the ventricles and aortas as thick as a cow’s would be.
“What did you do to yourself?”
She pointed to the empty barrel yards from them, resting between two trees. “I drank it all. I woke like this. I can speak to you in your mind, Dale. This blood’s exceptional. It’s turned me into something greater than Ruden.” She clenched her fists. “I could crush him.”
“You've undergone a complete metamorphosis.”
She nodded at the barrel, encouraging him to enjoy it. “Drink it up. You’ll see firsthand what it does.”
Annie easily removed the hermetically sealed container with her fingers with the ease of popping the tab of an aluminum can. He was overcome with a form of hydro-mania at the smell. He dunked down into the barrel to reap his fill. Dale was half-way finished with the container in minutes, slugging mouthful after mouthful. His processes raced during the consuming process. Around his chest, his heart expanded and frenzied in its cage. Millions of blood vessels and arteries tripled in size. Electric currents buzzed and crackled throughout his body and jolted him repeatedly.
Licking the sides for more blood, the unbearable pain finally arrived. The quaking rooted in his core, and then branched out to his arms, legs, and head in shocking throngs. He pulsated. Every transport of his circulatory system mutated. Seconds later, his flesh undid itself, cruelly scoring muscular layers off like a rolling yarn, until the dermis had been completely undressed. De-fleshed, Dale spilled out of the barrel and landed on the grass. He couldn’t move; the violent sensation of every cell in his body growing kept him still.
Annie waited near him, those immense peepers watching him writhe in agony. Though she had no real facial features, her expression was delighted. “It’ll be over soon. Hold on. Take the pain.”
Soon wasn’t enough for him to endure the attack, but he wouldn’t feel it much longer. After a burst of spinal conflagrations, he quickly shut down and fell asleep. Dale rested for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, in recuperation. Every inch of him was raw and bared.
Coming to consciousness, he studied his palms and arms and the rest of his fleshless body. He was astonished at the coating that was impenetrable by the touch. Dale flexed his arm; a grapefruit bicep rippled beneath a net of snaking veins. His chest rumbled: Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.
She greeted him with a lascivious kiss. Without lips, their tongues mingled unimpeded by flesh. “I told you this was wonderful.”
He agreed. “Ruden’s processing more of that blood. That’s what that pit is for. We have to learn how to make it. He doesn’t care what I’m doing anymore. He’s not in my mind. And I know he won’t keep me around when their meeting tonight is through. We’ll both be killed.”
“That doesn’t matter. Ruden and his bitch are going to be dead before they can try. So are the rest of them.”
“What do we do now?”
“Watch them and what they do next.” She pointed through the nursery to the cider mill. “When they least expect it, it’ll be us draining them.”
“There’s not much time before someone outside of Smithville catches on that everybody’s dead. Maybe hours, maybe another day...maybe any minute.”
She scoffed at the idea of human intervention. “We’ll hide in that well. Isn’t that where you said Ruden climbed out of and got you hooked? I’m sure it’s comfortable if he’s stayed down there for so many years. We'll transport the blood underground.”
“Then there’s isn’t much time at all if we’re going to pull all of that off before authorities start showing up.”
They marched up the path. Dale scanned every direction, but it was obvious each person alive in the city limits were inside the cider mill either dead or one of them.
The bustle of conversation suddenly leveled off, and he asked her, “What's going on in there?”
He was the first to peer through the hole in the cider mill's wall. Each of the hundred inside had trained their eyes to the person standing in the middle of them. The person was giving a speech, the crowd cheering and clapping and watching with adoring eyes.
That speaker wasn't Ruden.
39
Lenora followed Ruden the moment he bounded into the woods. Curiosity and concern inspired every step, even down into the wishing well. Staying unknown to Ruden, she surveyed the first room, and it was quickly evident why he had kept her out of his affairs. She was stabbed by every sight, betrayed at every corner, the evidence too great to avoid.
Her night vision allowed her a clear view in the darkness. She stood before a great machine. The room was the size of a public bathroom stall, but half of it was taken up with a bookshelf-shaped device made of steel. Plastic tubes intertwined down the sides and dozens of fan blades were at its core. Twenty glass vials were lined on the bottom to catch whatever dripped from the tubes above them. On one corner, a control panel was lit up with the buttons labeled: MIX. OPERATE. POTENT. THIN. TERMINATE.
The container on top of the table beside the machine interested her. She touched the lid of the rubber tote box. Lenora opened it and a cloud of dust from inside shot up. She backed up so as not to breath it in. When it settled, she peeked into the box.
Red powder.
It smelled slightly of blood, but it wasn’t blood.
A weak voice entered her mind, and she recognized it as Hector’s—though it was frantic and gone in seconds. They'd been his final words. In that short moment, her mind was able to connect what everything in this room meant. Hector described that the device was supposed to mimic a heart. The powder was to be mixed with water and turn into blood, but it had ultimately failed. It dissolved insides, the equivalent of pumping arsenic into the bloodstream.
A sense of dread was attached to the understanding of the room’s components.
Lenora’s concerns about this bunker were validated.
She went into full-out search mode, scanning the stacks of corpses aged by time and decay in one corner. Hundreds filled the chamber. Only seeing fetid bodies, she continued through to the next door. though slowly, being uncertain of each room.
The sights at the back of this chamber sent her into a fury. The bed. The sex toys. Dildos. Leather whips. Butt plugs. Balls and gags. Half-burnt candles. Rubber body suits. The evidence was clear, and to twist the knife deeper into her heart, were the handcuffs hanging from the bedpost. They were engraved with Ruden’s and her own initials. She had given them to him as a present, and now, he had used them on other women.
Bastard.
Lenora’s rage hit a crescendo, and she stomped back to the hall, through a door, and happened upon the room Ruden was standing in. He dropped the man in his clutches at the sight of her, caught. Her arrival was clearly unexpected.
"Aren’t you supposed to be at the cider mill?”
“So what if I’m not? Why aren’t you up there?”
He stood arms at hips, ignoring the man who coughed for breath at his feet. “I ask the questions—why are you down here?”
She shoved past him, opening the door on the left of Ruden to uncover more secrets. “I’ll ask the questions now.” Beyond the threshold was a conveyor belt jutting with blades, much like the apple presses in the cider mill. Bones and flesh had clogged the device, decayed and worm-ridden. Heaps of clothes were piled at the end of the room, enough for ten thrift stores, and she made note that most of them were women’s clothing.
“Tell me what you’ve been doing in this laboratory?—and don’t tell me you’ve been working on a way to create blood."
She lunged towards him, attempting to throttle his neck, when Ruden punched her in the gut. The force drove her up to the ceiling. She lost her bladder. Her lungs constricting at the blow. Four ribs had snappedin half. Blood surged up her throat. On the way back down, plaster rained against her back, and landing, she was paralyzed and sprawled out on the floor.
Ruden planted his foot on her neck to anchor her down. Enraged, “You couldn’t keep away, could you? Everything would've been fine if you didn't come down here. I told you not to. I tried to keep you out of it. This will cost you your life, you know that?"
She wheezed, barely able to throw out the words. “Have you found a cure for our blood solution, or is that just bullshit?”
He cackled, delighted by the question, “We invented useless devices that created blood, but none of it was safe or effective. The more we experimented on people, the more we grew weary and exhausted. We feasted on blood, mostly. Those bodies added up to hundreds—hundreds, Lenora. We’d take turns driving across the Midwest collecting victims. Hookers. Panhandlers. The homeless. Anybody alone at night we swept up into our lair.”
