Authors: Alan Spencer
Nelson shouted after him. “Billy—Billy, what the hell are you doing?”
He dived through the main entrance’s rotating doors. The lobby was empty. Furniture and signs had been knocked over and strewn on the tiles. He decided to avoid the elevator and used the emergency stairs. Winded, he was determined to reach the fourth floor. His heart pounded in his ears. Sweat rolled down his face and body. He didn’t care. His father could be dead.
Up the third floor and closing in on the fourth, he came upon EMTs and the stretchers they’d lost hold of when the dome touched down.
An EMT called out, “Hey, you can’t be in here.”
Another EMT piped up. “That’s a crime scene. You’re not allowed inside. I’ll have you arrested.”
Billy shot back, “Then arrest me.”
At the head of the stairs, the door opened. A group of EMTs called out, “Look outside. Jesus Christ, it’s pitch black out there.”
“Maybe the sun finally burned out,” a voice replied.
Billy ignored them. Fear radiated from each of them. Panic would set in soon for him too. All he could focus on was his father. The hospital hadn’t lost power, he was relieved to see. The helmet, the dome, whatever it was, he thought there had to be a reasonable explanation for that.
Body bags were littered the length of the hall, each bag sitting outside a patient’s room. Six were wrapped up at the nurse’s station. He thanked God he didn’t have to see what had happened to them. What could cause such horror? Blood spattered the tiles and the ceilings and every inch of the corridor. The knot in his stomach increased ten-fold.
Billy arrived at his father’s room. A body bag was positioned outside the door. He knelt down, two fingers clasping the zipper, but he couldn’t bring it down. “This isn’t happening.
No,
it can’t be you in there…
”
His body trembled, emotions threatening to spill out. Billy unzipped the bag enough to see his father’s chalky pale face and the dried blood on his forehead. He zipped it back up. Billy covered his mouth with both hands and muffled a scream. He punched the wall and stood up. Then he wept and leaned into the wall.
Maybe if I visited sooner, this wouldn’t have happened.
He eyed the dozens of body bags.
I couldn’t have stopped them. Look at the blood. Look at all of it.
Every mental defense mechanism kicked in to prevent Billy from collapsing into a helpless fetal position. He was strong enough to catch his breath and then steady his breathing. A looming dread filled him to his core when he glanced at the window at the end of the hall. Pitch black stared back at him. The shadows of an abyss. The air was thinner up here, it seemed. Fresh breezes didn’t exist. Whatever covered the sky was also blocking the wind. Images filled Billy’s mind. The man at the crosswalk exploding and the strange grin that spread on his lips shortly before he turned into a mess of limbs and blood. It copied the movie right down to the character's features.
His father’s injuries. The hospital wing of body bags. And the bizarre shell over the city that resembled a skull cap. Something was happening that was unreal, and perhaps unstoppable.
A hand touched his shoulder. Billy whipped around in fright.
“It’s only me,” Nelson said, looking down at the body bag nearest his feet. “Is that…is that your father?”
Billy nodded, questioning everything. “What killed him?—what killed these people?”
Nelson kept his voice calm, though he couldn’t hide the tremors surging up his body. His instincts were telling him to be careful, to stay on guard. “This is a police matter now. Whatever this all really means, they have to figure it out. Not us. We’re normal people.”
A jolt of worry had Billy dialing his cell phone. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings. “Come on, pick up. Jessica, pick up the fucking phone.”
“I’m lucky, I guess,” Nelson said. “My family lives in Illinois. And I don’t have a girlfriend. Nobody I have to call.”
“Yeah, real lucky,” Billy said. He waited another ring. Then Jessica picked up. “Are you safe?” he asked.
“Yeah, I'm at work. Where are you?”
“I’m at the hospital. My dad’s gone. I mean he’s dead. Something killed the entire fourth floor of the hospital. They’ve been wheeling out bodies all morning.”
“Billy, I’m so—”
“Stay where you are. I’ll be there soon. Lock your office door. I don’t know what the hell is going on outside.”
“I saw it come from the sky,” Jessica said frantically. “Out of nowhere, it floated down. It’s a dome or something.”
“Promise me you’ll hole up in your office. I’m coming for you.”
“But what’s going on, Billy? What came from the sky? The police are cruising the streets telling everybody to stay home. You can’t go out there.”
“Like hell I can’t. I already lost my father today. I’m not losing anyone else I care about because of the idiot police. You think they know what’s happening? Look outside, something’s over the city blocking the sun. They can’t do anything about it. Who knows what danger we’re in? They can't stop this.”
Jessica was speechless for a second, and then she was desperate. “Then be safe. Don’t do anything stupid. And hurry.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Nelson had watched him the entire conversation. “You up for the trip?” Billy asked him. “You can go home if you want.”
“No way,” Nelson said, shaking his head. “I’m with you. It’s not safe anywhere, if you ask me, not until we figure out what the hell has boxed us in the city.”
Billy fled the fourth floor with Nelson at his tail. The EMTs and police were too busy controlling the crowd of frantic citizens outside to notice two men running uptown into the darkness.
Chapter Fifteen
The buxom vampire beauties added another reel onto the living room projector. The redhaired vixen couldn’t resist the title and its possibilities:
Slasher Girls
.
Chained hand and foot, blindfolded, Harry Fallwell was walked through a dank corridor of moldy stale air. Drips echoed from overhead. He was underground, maybe near the sewers. Behind him, he listened to the conversation of his captors.
“Today’s a big day for you, Marlene,” a husky, deep woman’s voice said, one afflicted by heavy doses of alcohol and chain smoking. “I have charts, files and hard evidence of who you are. This isn’t an orphanage for estranged girls. Yes, I’ve raised you and fifty others, but the truth is, I’ve saved you from being aborted.”
“Oh no,” he whispered, the pang in his chest as sharp as a knife. “Oh shit.”
“Quiet,” the woman demanded. She yanked on the back of his hair. “Haven’t you done enough, Dr. Fallwell? You’ve aborted hundreds of unborn women. We have rights. Women have the right to choose. You pressured them. You wanted to abort them. You get off on women’s suffering!”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, I’m a doctor. Yes, I’ve performed abortions, but my practice is sensitive and caring to its clients. We educate on birth control methods, offer counseling sessions, and I always find out for certain if a woman wants to abort her child. I think you have the wrong guy. I haven’t done anything to you people. Why have you kidnapped me?”
His skull thunked when the wooden baton struck his head. Harry stumbled to his knees, crying out as painful stars shined in his eyes. Blood raced down his head. He managed one last comment before his mouth was duct-taped shut. “You women are crazy!”
“A woman sticks up for herself,” the husky woman said, “and you consider her crazy? I bet you think women are inferior to you. You think it’s funny we can vote, hold down jobs, decide if we want children, and if we don’t want to fuck you when you want it, you think we’re prudes—or you’ll call us sluts anyway! We’re the ones infected by your testosterone disease. Your seed sows our fate. It changes our lives. You can walk out anytime you want and leave us with your burdens. Dr. Fallwell, you’re as guilty as any man out there. This school I’ve started is designed to take you out one-by-one, and we will. It’ll take extreme measures for equality, but we’ll get there. One day, men will fear sex.”
Harry could sense he was passing by rooms, as he walked on blindly. Throughout the rooms, chains rattled, whips cracked, glass shattered and flesh burned. Men howled in pain. Shrieking.
Then he heard knives raked against carving stones. The muffle of gunfire at a firing range.
“Marlene, all of us were saved from being aborted. We stormed clinics like Harry’s and saved you from being extracted from the womb. We helped your mother raise you, your real mother, Marlene. She’s ready to meet you. You thought you were an orphan, but we were shaping you and your mother. You two will make the perfect team. Society will finally be as it should, with men crumbling at our feet.”
A door opened, the bottom scraping against concrete. Harry was tied to a wall, his hands above his head, legs shackled to the floor. His blindfold was removed. He turned to the wall behind him. A target was painted in what looked like human blood. He was standing in some kind of firing range. To the left and right of him, men were chained up as he was, many dead, chock full of holes from bullets and unknown implements.
He noticed the two women he assumed had brought him here. Jerry couldn’t see them clearly, but he caught the older woman hand the younger one a dagger.
“You know where to throw it, Marlene.”
“Nooooooooo!”
“Become one of us. You’ll meet your mother. Everything will be as it was supposed to be before men turned society upside down.”
“Pleeeeeeeease noooooooooooo”
“Marlene, you are now one of the Slasher Girls. Now throw the knife where it counts. He won’t be a man much longer…”
Vickers aimed his shotgun and released a round into the nearest vampire. The black-haired woman’s chest caved in, fluids spattering out her back. Her scream was limited by gurgling. She landed on all fours and stopped moving. Rushing forward, he untied Fuller from the bed. The man was naked, but he scrambled to throw on a pair of jeans and a shirt wadded up on the floor. Fuller stood up, visibly breathing hard in the projector’s light. A scene of a man stalking a screaming couple was displayed. The attacker’s head split in two, the man’s brains chewing and biting at the air with teeth and a pair of ogling eyes.
Fuller bounded forward to kick the projector to its side when four of the vampires entered the room. Vickers backed up in the corner. He attempted to fire another round, but the gun was empty.
“Shit!”
Fuller opened the window. “Quick, the fire escape! We don’t have a choice.”
Vickers urged Fuller to go first. Now he clutched the shotgun as a bludgeon. “You stay away from me, you crazy bitches. I don’t know who you are or how you’ve pulled it off, but you’ve murdered dozens of innocent people.”
“Is that all?” The blonde was disappointed. “It’s been more than that, and they all bled like stuck pigs and tasted just as sweet. And you won’t be any different than the other swine when I bite into your flesh…or whatever else is out there that will do the biting for me.”
Vickers couldn’t battle them in the room. The most brutal of tactics couldn’t bring down the bizarre foe. Fuller was already down to the first floor and safer than him. Vickers gave him five seconds to flee the scene. Then he heaved the shotgun at the vampires and jumped through the open window onto the fire escape landing. His trench coat caught on something inside, and he instinctively slipped out of it completely and left it behind. Down the metal stairs, he pumped his arms and legs as fast as he could—fear of slipping and falling be damned! He turned his gaze upward to check for any aerial assaults. He was surprised they didn’t come. But the vampires laughed, the piercing shrieks and cackles of celebration. The notes carried higher and higher. Vickers couldn’t help but feel like he’d made a mistake.
The vampires wanted him out of the apartment.
They were victorious.
He touched down onto the alley. Ted Fuller waited eagerly and wide-eyed behind a garbage bin. He was gaunt, white-lipped and drained of energy, but something had given him strength to escape the apartment.
Vickers stared up at the sky again; they weren’t pursing them. He checked his watch. “It’s noon right now. And it’s pitch black.”
“You didn’t watch the movie,” Ted said. “In
Bone Dome
, a giant skull sits over a city. The city fights to escape as the air is slowly used up. The sun is gone, you see.”
“You can’t be serious.” Vickers rubbed at his tired eyes. His sense of disbelief was ever-expanding, as was his migraine. “This can’t be real, yet there it is, the sky is blocked by bone. Maybe it’s bone, maybe it’s not, but there it is. And those women upstairs, they’re the ones who killed everybody at Iowa University. Christ, I had you pegged for the killings. I thought you were using special effects. Or maybe it was a cult following of yours.”