B-Movie Attack (25 page)

He slammed his fist onto the tabletop in frustration. He couldn't think clearly enough to decide what to do next.
 

Then someone asked him, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

Ted shot his gaze to the bar. There he was, walking death himself. He should’ve known before the first word touched his ear. The smell. The embalming fluid.
 

The Pickler.

“I created you,” Ted snarled. “Just leave me the hell alone, and I’ll leave you the hell alone.”

The Pickler drip-drip-dripped between words. His features, his skin, underneath his fingernails, from his eyes, they all exuded chemicals. The Pickler was more deathlike now than in the movie, Ted observed, his cheekbones sunken and his eyes a faded olive color and his skin eel-gray.
 

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” he asked again.

“I—”

Ted stopped himself. The question was familiar. It was a line of dialogue from the script he wrote. He crafted his response carefully. “You only live once. Death is the final ride.”

“Yes,” the corpse replied in a low drool. “That’s why I carve the dead for their insides, for their organs. I steal from the dead to give to the living. The dead should be liquidized wholesale. And the no-pulsers, it should be a prerequisite for the grave to give up their parts. Surgeons should be stationed at morgues to take what's needed.”

“You’re doing a public service selling body parts,” Ted said in encouragement. “The dead don’t use them, the greedy pus heads. Selfish assholes.”

The Pickler was disappointed Ted didn’t play along correctly. He tried again anyway. “You don’t need consent to borrow from the dead. Even your sister’s body, Ted, I surgically removed her heart. Somebody else could use it. She’s dead and rotting, what does she care?”

Ted stood up from his chair.
 

That wasn’t in the script.

Trisha’s been dead for three years.
 

“If you know so much about her, then how did she die?”

The Pickler smiled, the trickle of embalming fluid audible. “She was held at knifepoint for her purse. In New York, she was in the subway alone. The robber decided to have some fun with her, and—”

Ted hurled a stool at the villain. The corpse was fast and ducked to avoid it.
 

“Stripped her naked—”

“SHUT UP!”

Ted delivered another stool across the room, but his aim was off, the tears in his eyes blurrng his vision.
 

“Told her he’d slit her throat if she screamed—”

“Another word from you, and I’ll send you to hell!”

“You said so yourself, there is no afterlife. Death is the final ride, and you’re about to be strapped in!”

He rushed for the door, but Ted stopped at the table next to him. The ashtray was full of stubbed-out menthol cigarettes. The Zippo lighter next to the ashtray beckoned him. Embalming fluid formed a puddle around the walking corpse, the dripping still at a constant.
 

“Death
is
the final ride,” Ted shouted, picking up the Zippo and flicking it. “And it's sending you right to hell!”

He lit the floor.
 

Blue flames puckered and trailed toward the corpse in shark-fin arcs. The Pickler was instantly engulfed. His skin crackled, sparks flying as they popped and burst. His eye sockets exploded in pops. His flesh smoldered, every layer of embalming fluid ignited within him. The bar was clogged with the choking stench of burning flesh and caustic fluids.
 

Ted pushed open the door and sucked in breaths of air, though it was stale.
 

Thinning.
 

That dome is going to snuff us all.

The bar was lit from within, the firelight dancing strong. The night was a yellow, orange and red blaze as the corpse continued to pursue him. “I’ll never die,” he gargled and coughed. “I’ll just keep burning.”

Bright lights shined, like two monster eyes. Ted heard the growl of pistons churning and an engine sputtering smoke as the rig closed in on him. With the roll of steel against pavement, the steam roller barreled toward him.
 

What else is coming out of the jungle tonight?

Ba-bam!

Sparks shot from the curb next to his feet. The driver was shooting at him. Ted sprinted up the street. He caught the slasher girls guarding his apartment building, blithely picking their nails with the tips of daggers and axes, and sharing giddy schoolgirl conversation. “
I shoved that rod up his ass, and afterwards, he didn’t want to try anal sex on me ever again
…”

“
Figures
,” a slasher girl laughed. “
After I cut off his balls and stomped them into the ground, he no longer wanted my number after the party. Men are strange creatures. I really thought he liked me
.”

Ted disregarded the troubling conversation when the rig revved its engine, the spotlight touching him again. He dove behind a stack of garbage cans. Ba-bam! A cannon blasted, ear-drum shatteringly loud. Garbage lids shot up with wild
ping
sounds. Ted crawled for better cover, soon getting up and racing between two buildings, up another street, and retreating into a residential neighborhood. The houses were boarded up from within. He screamed and begged for help. Not even a porch light flickered on in response.
 

The steam roller was nowhere in sight.
 

He imagined being flattened into the street, every bone snapped, every inch of him pulped. The only beacon of salvation was up ahead, a lone standing grocery store, a Piggly Wiggly. Ted rounded to the side of the building where an F-150 truck was parked. The driver was half out of the driver’s seat, hanging limply. His skull was hollow, a hole at the top where his brains had been sucked out.
 

The truck's keys were in the ignition.
 

Ted checked the back door into the store. It was partly open. He had access to the goods inside, he realized. Looking back to the truck, he knew he couldn’t actually escape the city. Chicago was under a skull dome prison. He was trapped here unless he changed the situation. He had to play by the rules of the ghosts who possessed the projector.
 

With the truck and a few creatively picked supplies, he believed he had a chance to re-enter the apartment and destroy the projector.
 

But first, he had much work to do…
 

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Father Richard Malone hid in the confessional. Fifty people had found shelter in Saint Anna Catholic Church, but nobody knew he was inside the booth. Many were members of the congregation, and they were doing fine, he thought, muttering prayers on their own. The windows were blockaded by stacks of pews. Some people were huddled up and studying the outside through the small openings. What he was hiding from was terrifying, and it could still be waiting outside for him.
 

His fear was the schoolgirl wearing a simple plaid miniskirt. She was maybe seventeen. There were dozens of them, but only one had tracked him through the garden in the back of the church and pursued him.
 

“Don’t you remember me?” the schoolgirl called out to him. “I’m Cathy Higgins.”

The name Cathy Higgins tightened his spine. That cold sticky sweat of guilt gave him a slimy feeling. A horrible caught sensation itched at him. Nobody knew about Cathy Higgins, and that schoolgirl wasn’t Cathy Higgins.
 

How did
she
know about Cathy Higgins?

“You said you’d stay with me,” the schoolgirl posing as Cathy Higgins had said to him. “I put out for you. I wanted to give myself to you. I want you, Richie. Let me have you. Every bit of you. Bend me over. Show me the Holy Spirit. I want it inside me!”

He’d demanded, “How do you know about Cathy Higgins?”

Cathy was a sweet girl, a congregation member, who’d fallen in love with him. She'd meet him in confession. He never had sex with her, but she masturbated during confession, and the worst part of it was, he watched her and enjoyed every moment of it. The memory of it sickened him. Disgusted him.
 

He kept running from the girl who knew about Cathy Higgins. She raised a blade and kept chasing him. “I can show you pleasure, Richie. The knife will set you free from your manhood. No more machismo bullshit. No more lust. You’ll have your God and your church. Isn’t that what matters to you most? Without your dick in the way, you’ll hand yourself over to God completely. You’ll get it back in heaven, I promise.”

He lost the girl when he ran into the church and locked the door behind him. That's when he'd hidden in the confessional booth.
 

“My brothers and sisters…” Words seeped through the cracks of the confessional booth, and he listened. “…you are safe here. This is God’s haven. Nothing can harm you in His kingdom. This is judgment day. The day of reckoning is upon us. I am his judge. I will deem who is fit to walk in heaven or just to crawl the wretched burning fields of hell. Now I must remove your soul to know this, but I promise after I’m finished, I’ll put it right back.”

A hushed silence descended on the church. Richard peeked through the crack of the door. The preacher at the podium was a stranger. He was dressed in a black cassock. His brow bent in a sharp V, eyes shark black as he studied each person in the church.
 

Who does he think he is?

He’s not a man of the cloth.

“NOW IS THE TIME FOR YOUR JUDGMENT!”

Up from the floorboards burst a rolling platform holding a U-shaped metal device. It crackled and flashed blue and white lightning and fired electromagnetic currents. The false priest was behind the device, static electricity raising the hairs on his arms and head. Shocked, Richard was nailed in place. He watched in helpless denial. The currents pierced scrambling, shrieking bodies. Many attempted to undo the barricade and crawl through the windows. Those who did crawl through immediately received an axe to the head from outside. The group of ravaging schoolgirls attacked, relishing the blood they reaped. Giddy laughter and sing-song voices entered the church:

“Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man, how many heads can we reap?”

The moment the electromagnetic light would touch a body, the flesh split down the middle, and the skeleton was wrenched free, parting and splitting muscle and skin. The skeleton flew onto the giant magnet. The bones crashed against it, breaking into brittle pieces. “YOU’RE GOING TO HELL! AND SO ARE YOU, MA’AM. SONNY, IT’S TOO LATE TO MEET CHRIST. YOU WERE A WHORE WORTHY OF A ROMAN ORGY! YOU’RE DAMNED TO HELL, ALL OF YOU!!! STEP RIGHT UP AND ACCEPT YOUR FATE!”

Few were left alive after minutes of flying skeletons and deflated bodies hitting the floor.
 

You have to do something. You can’t sit there and watch them die. Face him.
 

Richard charged out of the booth and tackled the preacher. He caught the man off guard. They crashed to the floor, spun and landed where they shouldn’t have. Neither of them had a chance to escape the electromagnetic rays and the inevitable removal of their bones.
 

Georgia, the vampire, stood before the wall and watched fifteen minutes of the film entitled
Preggers
. Anne, the auburn beauty, strutted into the room. “They didn’t kill Ted.”

“That idiot?” Georgia flipped her head back in amusement. “He can’t do anything. He’s a coward. A waste of human skin. He's not a threat to us.”

“What if he comes back and tries to burn the place down again?”

“The slasher girls are outside. The steam roller is driving up and down the streets. That hooker is up and about. The brain faces, are…well, they’re eating brains. Mr. Baker isn’t dead either, though he’s nice and crispy. The Intestinator is nearby. He's not dead either. The Pickler is burning and spreading his death fluid everywhere. And Death Reject isn’t down for the count. They’ve done nothing to stop us.”

“What about Dr. Aorta?”

The name struck a strange chord with her. “Dr. Aorta, who’s he?”

The front door opened. Slasher girl after slasher girl entered with a new corpse in their hands or over their shoulders. Each body suffered head wounds, neck slashes, bodily lacerations and disembowelments. “Hang them in the tub to drain, you lovelies,” Georgia said, welcoming them.
 

“The tub’s full of blood and spilling over,” the cherry red-haired schoolgirl complained. “And this guy’s fuckin’ heavy.”

Georgia got up and met the schoolgirl. “Then stack them up in the bedroom.” Georgia groped the girl’s buttocks and teased between her legs. Before the slasher girl could react, Georgia bit off her lips, tongue, and wildly drank the blood flowing from the wounds. She bit through the girl’s neck in one chomp, nearly taking out the entire neck. The head bobbed to the side hanging on a single bit of gristle.
 

“So tasty,” she cackled. “Red and delicious.”

The slasher girl struck the carpet dead.
 

“If you fail to murder this city, you’ll end up like her—understand me? Work faster. Kill everyone!”