Authors: Alan Spencer
In the backseat of the rig, he noticed a double-barreled shotgun.
The steamroller started on its own.
In a voice as sharp as gravel, Hank said, “Looks like my ride is here…”
Anne vanished into smoke, as did the blood that had stained the carpet beneath her body. Georgia smiled, reassured the next reel would resurrect her fallen brethren. She played
500 Foot Hooker
in her honor:
Ray Johnston—Johnny Ray as friends called him—was walking up Manhattan Drive. His two business associates, one who named himself “Rock”, the other “Silk”, were also on foot, dressed in mink coats and clutching ivory canes with sizeable diamonds on the top. Beneath the coats they wore burgundy suits. Both had seventies discothèque afros with a hair pick jutting out the side.
Johnny Ray aimed his cane in the direction of the abandoned warehouse just down the road. “Is that where we’re meeting this jive turkey? Man, I’ve got bitches waitin’ for a good bangin’. Why the hell am I here on a Saturday night? I’ve got bills to collect and booties to slap.”
“This is business,” Silk said coolly, side-stepping and spinning and breaking out in a two-step for no good reason. “This bitch is for sale, this doctor says. This is one of those good bitches. Real nice. Can shake it something sweet. We’ll make money off this piece. Melted butter on bread, my brudda.”
Johnny Ray was skeptical. “We don’t know this punk. Doctor could be a jive turkey copper.”
Rock agreed. “Yeah, he might be a cop. Do you wanna be riding piggy back to the pen?”
Silk stopped on the sidewalk. “If you don’t want a part of this business venture, then go back to your stank ass bitches. They get twenty to fifty bucks a pop if they’re good, but this bitch—this bitch, man, she’s a grand a pop. Butter dripping down your rolls, jive talkas. Now you’ve hurt my feelings. I let you in on the secret. The big event. THE BIG, fellas. Shit, you ain’t acting interested. When you set your eyes on this bitch, you’ll want to sample the product.”
Johnny Ray opened up his suit to showcase the .45 caliber pistol tucked under his arm. “This better be THE BIG.”
Rock chimed in, “Saturday nights only come once a week. The score better be good. Damn good, you get me, turkey?”
Silk guided them to the warehouse. The sign outside was faded and pocked with bullet holes. They entered the YOU RENT IT storage building.
The warehouse was dark as pitch. Johnny Ray flipped his sterling silver Zippo lighter. “Turn on the lights. I can't see.”
The voice of a carnie announcing an attraction came from the back of the warehouse: “Welcome, my friends. I have the greatest hooker in history. Every customer will shell out the big greens for this fine lady. This genetically created and enhanced beauty will do anything I tell her, and she'll only listen to me. I will rent her out to you for—”
Johnny Ray fired a round into the dark.
“Gaack!”
The announcer audibly slipped from a staircase above and landed with the crunch of bone. Silk flipped on a lever next to an oversized breaker box and it sparked on, charged with thousands of volts of juice. “You shot that honky before he spoke his piece.”
Johnny Ray blew on the smoking barrel. “I said my piece too. That bitch is mine. Where is she? Nobody sells to the pimp. The pimp sells to them.”
The rattle of chains, the snapping of steel, and from beneath the giant tarp spread out on the floor, she came alive. Red leather stilettos. Pink fishnets. Red g-string. A tattoo of a cartoon devil on her inner thigh sucking on its forked tail. A darker red tube top housed huge breasts. Her hair was dyed electric red.
And she was two-hundred feet tall.
“You killed my pimp!” The scream tore paint and bricks from the walls. An earthquake erupted as she cried. The point of her stiletto heel impaled Johnny Ray through the midsection. She flung him off of her shoe. “Eww, gross.”
Johnny Ray was thrown twenty yards and collided into the wall.
His dying words: “Ah shit, bitch!”
Silk opened fire, producing a golden Tommy gun from his mink coat.
Brat-brat-brat-brat-brat!
A fist hammered down and turned Silk into a squashed puddle of mink and guts and blood. The camera panned to a mouth coughing out a last word: “Skank.”
Rock fled the building only for the top of the warehouse to be flung into the air and crash down upon him. The woman stood, as tall as the nearby buildings. “EVERY MAN WILL DIE,” she screamed, the decibels shattering panes of glass. “EVERY MAN WILL SUFFER!”
The strawberry-blonde vampire who was once named Hillary Doeskin—who died in real life when struck by a flying stop sign during a tornado in Missouri—inserted another reel into the projector. She watched intently, enthralled by the film entitled
The Pickler
:
The funeral home was surrounded by the townspeople of Heatonville. Citizens stood between gravestones, the shadows of night carving their features into vicious folds of hatred. They knew Jack White’s secret. The funeral director had taken liberties with the town’s freshly dead, and tonight, he would pay.
“Come on out,” Frank Morgan, the leader of the mob, demanded. He was mayor, and his late wife, Jo-Beth, was about to become a victim of Jack White’s extracurricular activities. “Jack, we know you’re in there. You’re cutting up Jo-Beth’s body as we speak, aren’t you? You’re going to sell it to body brokers, right? For a few bucks you’ve desecrated her, you greedy son-of-a-bitch! You've desecrated them all. This is your last chance to come out before we break in and force you out.”
“Break the door down!”
“Lynch the bastard!”
“Burn the place down!”
Frank Morgan motioned for the four cops behind him to drive a battering ram through the front door. The crash of wood satisfied the crowd’s lust for revenge. Frank led the throng into the foyer. The room was empty, but the basement door was wide open.
“We know you’re down there, Jack,” Frank shouted over the din and curses. “Show yourself, or we’re coming down there. WE'RE COMING DOWN ANYWAY!”
Moments passed, the crowd growing even more violent. Frank aimed his flashlight at the basement door. There was only silence. “HERE WE COME, YOU BASTARD!”
Tommy Prichard, Dwight Meason and Melissa Dowery followed behind him. Melissa clutched a noose and Tommy and Dwight each carried a high-powered rifle. Frank didn’t care about the threat of violence surrounding him. He too wanted revenge.
The lights in the basement were suddenly turned off. “Now we know we’ve got him,” Frank rejoiced. “You’re not escaping us. You can't hide, not even in the dark.”
Frank found the switch on the wall and flipped the lights back on.
Upon their entrance, Jo-Beth was splayed on a steel gurney. Her legs were amputated at the hips. The legs themselves were iced in a foam cooler at the foot of the gurney. Her eyes were missing and so were her arms. The pale girl, “Queen Beauty of Heatonville”, was now a ruined corpse.
Jack White, the embalmer, was in his early sixties and wore an expression of calculated emotion. He didn’t want to appear too scared or too guilty. But soon, Frank watched in astonishment as the man’s face broke into a twisted grin. “Hah, hah, hah, your bodies are worth more dead than alive, you know that? What does it hurt to profit from a corpse? They don’t care. They're dead.”
Jack picked up the legs from the cooler and posed them standing, then he moved them so they seemed to walk. “They don’t give a shit. She’s dead. Fucking dead. She didn’t say no. Sure didn’t. I asked. She just froze up. Hah! Hah! Hah!”
Frank instinctively threw a punch into Jack’s face. He crashed into a box heaped with foam peanuts. Jack rose from the box, incensed, his humor wiped clean from his face. “Now how about I ship you in pieces across the state? People need these organs, you fools. My son died without a heart transplant. The dead don’t need their insides, but HE DID!”
Tommy, Dwight and Melissa closed in on Jack. Tommy snarled, “Let’s give him a taste of his own medicine.”
Melissa’s eyes bulged with fury. “I have a better idea. Let’s embalm the bastard.”
Dwight jammed a trocar needle into Jack’s mouth. “Swallow this!”
Embalming fluid was forced down Jack’s throat. “Naaaawgh!”
Melissa shoved another trocar into Jack’s torso. Then Tommy drove another into his neck. Jack was filling with chemicals. The man flung his arms, struggling to be free of the slow internal drowning. He fell to the floor, his mouth gushing embalming fluid onto the floor. The four stared at each other. Nobody spoke for moments.
“Thank the good lord he’s dead.” Tommy spat on Jack. “May you go to hell.”
Jack’s body shot up from the floor. His flesh was wet with embalming fluid. His eyes and nose dripped, his mouth seethed and his flesh exuded the substance through his sweat glands. Every word was fluid-choked. A devilish smile played on his face, carved by trails of clear fluid. “Death is chemical. Death is formaldehyde. Death is preservation. I am the new grim reaper. The voice in the shadows. The shrouded man at the gate. Now, let me touch you.”
Jack’s hands clasped Tommy’s hand. Suddenly, Tommy gagged and choked. Tommy’s jugular opened and spat out blood at such a high pressure it spattered onto the ceiling and the shocked onlookers. The embalming fluid flowed from Jack’s fingertips into the gaping jugular once it stopped spurting. Tommy was embalmed in seconds.
He flopped to the ground stone-cold dead.
“I am ‘The Pickler’,” Jack erupted in jubilation, spitting embalming fluid from his lips. “You created me, NOW FACE ME!”
Georgia had been watching the film behind Hillary’s shoulder. “Great choice, honey.”
Hillary kissed Georgia on the lips to celebrate another movie. “Death, blood, destruction, it’s all coming together. The city will suffer in terror.”
They watched out the window as the monsters they created took over the city.
Chapter Nineteen
Billy stopped at the stairs leading up to the elevated train. He wasn't sure if the system was still running despite everything. The city roared with violence, but between 11
th
and Tower Street, Chicago felt abandoned. They hardly encountered a single person once they fled the hospital. The apartment buildings, businesses and thoroughfares had been shut and locked and perhaps barricaded. A pair of eyes would occasionally peek through blinds to check on the state of the city, but otherwise, people were playing it safe. Fear permeated the dry air. The dome above them was gradually snuffing the city’s air supply.
Nelson double-checked the road for strange people. “How much longer before you think we suffocate?”
Billy shook his head. “Let’s pretend someone on the outside of this city’s forming a plan to save our asses. It’s not the air I’m worried about just yet.”
“How do you figure?”
“Whatever murdered my father and all those people is a bigger threat. And then the man who blew himself up yesterday. Think about it. Maybe there are more of them.”
“Do you really think any human being could transport a shell that big and cover the city?”
“Well, somebody did. Who would slice and dice an entire floor of hospital patients? I still believe that guy looked too much like that damn movie to be a coincidence. Shit, I don’t know. I can't make sense of it.”
“I can't either.”
“Then let’s get going. Jessica’s alone. Let’s hope the train’s still running.”
Billy raced up the stairs, already winded halfway up. He wouldn’t be much of a hero to Jessica if he couldn’t run a block without keeling over.
Who said she was in danger? She’s in a big secure building. I’m sure people are all around her. I'm the one who's in danger out here.
The platform was barren. Together, they waited for the next train to show up.
“What if the train doesn’t come?”
“It’s a solid three miles to Corporate Tower and the Crouch and Meadows offices,” Billy said. “It’s worth waiting a minute. It wouldn’t make sense to shut it down. There are innocent people still out and about who have to be carted back to their homes.”
The sound of a train broke the silence. It had to be two or three blocks from them. Billy’s nerves crested. He paced. Wind slipped through cracks of the wooden platform, whistling. He couldn’t erase the image of his father’s bloody face.
Nelson had been eying him for a time. “What are you thinking about?”
Billy felt the pang of tears coming. He wiped them away, pretending to be fighting fatigue. “My dad. He’s really gone. It hasn’t truly set in until now. I wish I hadn’t seen his dead body. It’s going to stay with me forever. The police wouldn’t tell me anything. It’s their fault I had to charge into that crime scene. I freaked out. He didn’t deserve to die like that. He was a good man. Firm, but still a decent man. He only wanted the best for me.”