B-Movie Attack (4 page)

“Please re-park your vehicle,” Billy said nicely. “I understand you’re in a hurry.”

“Oh, all right,” Dr. Adamson replied. “But here, I’ve made a spare key. I trust you, Billy-boy. You can move it for me. We’ve got a professional bond. I help you, and you help me. Thanks a bunch, Billy. Say hello to your dad. How’s his heart doing?”

“He’s taking care of himself.”

Dr. Adamson placed the key in Billy’s pocket and waltzed up the sidewalk to Heart of Chicago Medical Center. “Have a good afternoon, Billy.”

You son-of-a-bitch.

The meter was expired on a Corolla-XT. Billy wrote up the ticket and tucked it under the windshield wiper. A woman in a gray Hanover business suit rushed to the vehicle, shaking her head. She was Lola McCannon. Her hair was done up in a bun, knee-highs without any runs, her body toned, her face locked and ready for an argument. “Oh no, no, no—it’s not expired.”

Billy pointed to the red flag within the meter displaying the word “Expired”. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m five seconds late. Hey, I’ll buy you lunch. Fifteen bucks enough?”

Billy smiled. “You’re very nice for offering, but I can’t.”

“I’m a lawyer,” she insisted. “I won’t tell anybody. Look, here’s twenty—buy a side of fries or chips or whatever the hell you like.”

Billy relished the only time in his life he’d have power over a lawyer. “The ticket stays. I can't reverse it. Have a good day.”

“Listen, you smug, pudgy moron. I could have your assets frozen. I could sue your unborn children, assuming you could get it up or someone would want to sleep with you to conceive the damn kid. I’m just a hardworking American trying to get by, and it’s weasels like you who take menial jobs like a meter maid—”

“I’m a meter man, ma’am.”

“A meter man,” she corrected, “who fulfills their lackluster lives by tearing out tickets for law-abiding citizens like myself. You have little man syndrome? You didn’t score enough trophies in sports as a kid? Did Daddy not hug you enough? Forget it. Fine, I’ll fight this ticket.”

“Very good. Have a nice day.”

“Oh come on,” she insisted. “Twenty-five bucks—no, fifty—hey, eat at the Four Seasons. Have a hundred, take your lady friend if you have one.”

“I have a lady friend,” Billy said, “but she’s not interested. Have a nice day.”

Ten minutes later, Billy cruised uphill to 124
^th
Avenue and faced Lakeshore Park. Skaters, bikers and joggers came and went on both ends of the park. Dogs and morning commuters enjoyed the lake view. He caught a man in a pair of biker shorts and a Cubs ball cap cutting a Huffy ten speed’s chain with a pair of bolt cutters. Mornings for Billy normally weren’t this exciting. Billy called the crime in to the police, and a cruiser was already upon the man, who took off running. Billy drove up to block the man’s escape. The thief was cuffed, eyeing Billy with nothing short of animosity. “Hey, have a nice day,” Billy said to the criminal.

Billy’s thrill-a-minute morning hit two climaxes. Carlos Menendez radioed him from headquarters. He sounded sympathetic—a contrast against his normal bored and tepid tone—and said, “Billy, I’ve clocked you out. Get a move on to Heart of Chicago Medical Center. Your dad’s in the emergency room. Jessica called and told me what's going on.”

“What happened?”

“She didn’t say. Something happened at work. It sounds pretty serious, whatever it is. I’m sorry I didn’t ask. I hung up and called you ASAP.”

“Okay, thank you. I’ll return the vehicle. I’m on my way.”

A surge of concern caused Billy’s hands to tremble at the wheel. Did his father suffer another heart attack? This would be his third. One he kept secret when he was still married to Angela, his natural mother, and the other time, the doctors had to revive him from a temporary state of death; his heart had actually stopped beating—and Dr. Newsome made it clear how serious his condition was. The Cartons had a long family history of hypertension and heart disease, and father and son were each about a hundred pounds overweight.

Billy was stopped on the final turn back to headquarters. He waited for the light, clenching the steering wheel with white knuckles and drumming his free foot on the floor. He eyed the traffic with consternation. He had to see his father, and these assholes were in his way.

Three seconds were burned observing the strange man in the crosswalk while Billy waited for the light to change. The man stuck out in Corporate Square. The population mostly consisted of joggers in shorts or workers in suits. But this person wore a ragged pair of torn jeans and boots without a shirt. His body wasn’t pale, but instead whitish purple, his lips black as turpentine. The man’s knotted black hair hung in twisted strands down his face.
 

The light had changed to green.
 

Billy didn’t notice.

The strange man's face tightened as if someone pulled back the skin from behind his head. Every crevice and bend and feature was exaggerated. Inhuman. A giddy skeletal phantom. The most troubling part was, Billy recognized him, but he couldn’t remember from where.
 

The man exploded.
 

Barbara Meason had jogged three laps around Lakeshore Park. She was headed to Club La Femme for the morning step aerobics class. She ran in place waiting for the light to change and to cross the street. The cold breeze sank into her skin, but soon, it elevated into a jet of ice-cold air. Freezing cold. She shivered. Her lips trembled. The source was the abominable man standing three yards to her left. He was a mangy transient with the look of a corpse. White wormy veins snaked up and down what she could see of his skin. The flesh itself was purple-white, like the underside of a dead toad.
 

She had no chance to run or react. The danger didn’t present itself until the harm was already done.
 

THOOOM!

The walking corpse exploded. The debris was high-pressured spray. Frigid blood, flesh and gore struck her body with force. The bottom side of a mandible cut into her neck with a
thack
, slicing open her trachea and snuffing her ability to breathe.
 

Ernie Sommers pedaled his bicycle on his way to purchasing a morning paper when a rib bone punctured through his forehead and spat out the other end. Nellie Engels was tying her shoe on the sidewalk when a spine speared her chest. Ten metatarsals shot through Beverly Harper’s chest and diced up her lungs. A wall of skin wrapped around Frank Bullard’s face, restricting his airways; the more he dug his nails into the fabric, the tighter the sheath became until the bones of his face snapped and the contents of his head were forced up through his skull cap. Traffic officer Doug Young ducked behind his rolled-up window before the tide of blood and innards could touch him.
 

Five seconds afterward, the anatomical shrapnel pieces returned to their owner, his body, flesh and blood reconstructed in a blink. The man crossed the street whistling and thinking about the next round of chaos he could serve up.
 

Billy panicked, then phoned the police. Sirens wailed from each end of the four-way intersection. Three ambulances arrived. Three squad cars and counting. Random civilians were strewn on the sidewalks, bleeding from bizarre wounds. Medics were on the scene, stretchers and EMTs scrambling to make sense of the victims. He attempted to flag one of the police. “I saw the whole thing. There was a man with a bomb strapped to him.”

Nobody replied.

Citizens crowded the area, and the police batted them away. “Stand back. Let the victims through!”

There was no smoke or sulfur or gunpowder smell lingering in the vicinity. Splotches of blood covered the walkways—spattered like paint balls. Pieces of bone and flesh were embedded on the street light, the local newsstand and the Bird’s Nest Café window. Billy searched for traces of an explosive device.
 

One of the officers finally listened to him. They accepted his name and phone number and told him they’d be in contact with him very soon. Billy hovered in place for moments and finally decided he could be of no help.
 

Then he rushed to the hospital to visit his father.
 

Billy couldn’t stop thinking about how he recognized the man at the intersection.
 

Chapter Four

Coroner Gray Matthews said to the grief-stricken mother, “This man can’t die, Mrs. Hampton. Your son up and walked out of here without a pulse. He’s functioning, yet he’s clinically deceased.”

“What do you mean?” Marge Hampton demanded. She was standing in the morgue. The police had directed her to the basement wing of the hospital minutes ago. “He was shot four times. I was the one who shot him. He was clinically dead for forty-eight hours. I counted.”

“Jesus Christ, Mrs. Hampton—what are you saying?”

“I shot him dead. Dead as a doornail. Dead as a blasted doornail!”

Marge's body folded onto the puke-lime-colored tiled floor. Her black Sunday dress was long enough she could wrap herself up in it like a blanket and retreat into grief. “He was supposed to die of natural causes two years ago, you see. Ray suffered from a malfunctioning liver. Six months of bedridden suffering, I watched my kiddo fall apart. And then his pulse stops. He’s declared dead. He goes to the morgue, and then the next morning, he’s in bed at home like everything’s normal. But he’s rotting…and he now has special abilities.”

“Special abilities? Mrs. Hampton, isn’t coming back from the dead enough of a special ability?”

Marge exploded, “He can manipulate his body! I shouldn’t have taken him to the traveling circus when he was nine. The fire-breathers, the contortionists, the fucking clowns, they put ideas in his mind.”

“His readings are off the charts,” Coroner Matthews exclaimed, reading the steel machines in the corner of the room. “He doesn’t run on blood, but some strange ectoplasm.”

“It was present in his blood the first time he died,” Marge told him. “It’s unidentifiable. I say it’s the blood of death. The blood of death gives him powers. Nature is breaking its own rules. My son can’t truly die.”

Coroner Matthews opened his mouth in shock. Fluids bubbled from his throat and belly. Saliva frothed at his lips. His jaw opened wider and wider, creaking, cracking and then completely shattering in one wild jerk from an unknown force.
 

He puked blood, guts and bile onto the floor, and then his skin sizzled and melted from the bones to slowly reveal Ray standing in place of Coroner Matthews as if he’d been within the doctor the entire visit.
 

“Ray!” Marge hugged him, though he was wet with human blood and stamping in the remains of Coroner Matthews. “Why are you doing this? Be reasonable. So you can’t die. Why terrorize people? Why murder?”

“If death doesn’t want me, and the living abhor me, then I’m going to have some fun with my condition. I always wanted to be a freak at a sideshow. One day the world will appreciate my talents. They’ll eat salty popcorn and chug colas and pay ridiculous ticket prices to revel in my talent.”

“Was it so bad being dead?”

“I don’t know.” Ray shrugged. “Death wouldn’t have me. I guess the afterlife is pickier about who they let through the pearly gates these days. You have to let me go, Ma,” Ray said, urging her from him. “You’re holding me back from better things. Drawing attention to me. The police have been on my tail. I have to live my life on my own without you.”

He held his hand in front of her face, spread out the digits and wiggled them.
 

Marge watched nervously, her eyes unblinking. “W-what are you going to do, Ray? Be nice. I’m your mother. You wouldn’t hurt me. I, I love you, son.”

“I can’t die,” Ray reiterated, “but when you shot me with Daddy’s Desert Eagle three times in the chest, it hurt like a bitch!”

His hand disconnected from the wrist with a bone's clink. The hand acted as a separate entity and shoved its way into her mouth.
 

“Mmmm! Mmmmmph! Mmmmmmmph!”

Marge flopped onto her knees clenching her throat, which bulged and bulged. The skin threatened to burst, but the hand kept forcing its way down her throat.
 

“Graaaaaaagh! Aaaaack!”

Without warning, the hand shot out through her crumbling sternum clutching the still-beating heart. The hand squeezed the heart and sopped the final tick from the muscle before it went dead. The hand shot up back to his wrist and reconnected to the bone.
 

Ray exited the room. “Sorry, Mother, but if you can’t love me like this, then you can’t love me at all.”

Ted Fuller was sapped of strength. The vampires had ravaged him in bed six times over again. With the other women he’d made love to, the human women, a good nap and a cigarette was enough to recoup his energies, but with the vampires, it would take replacing electrolytes and eight hours of sleep to recover. The vampires had tied him to the bedpost. The five vanished last night and left him alone for two hours. When they returned, cases of reels were stacked in his room by the hundreds. Where they found the reels, he didn’t know.