Authors: Alan Spencer
He just touched the woman, and it embalmed her.
Holy shit.
Windows shattered from many stories above them. Screaming victims sailed through the sky, propelled by an unknown force. After seconds, Billy realized they weren’t bodies, but bloody skeletons. They were sucked toward a great magnet. Sparks exploded from the tips of the steel magnet, producing electric neon-white blasts and crackles and forks of lightning. A preacher was at the helm. He’d mounted the U-shaped device on a wooden cart. Skeletons and remains were spread out on the street in an ever-growing pile behind him, skulls and bones strewn everywhere.
“I will suck the evil from your souls,” the man cried out. “I will remove the corruption from your body so you can go to heaven righteous! Just step up, folks, and I’ll cleanse you.”
“Run faster!” Nelson shouted. “Don’t look at them.”
Wrecked car doors were pried from their hinges and new sets of bones were thrown into the magnet. Billy ducked and jumped ahead to avoid two piles of bloody bones heading right into his path. They clinked and rattled past him, flicking blood and hunks of gristle onto him.
Two more blocks, and they’d be at Corporate Tower.
Billy prayed Jessica was safe, because he sure as hell wasn’t.
The seven-story woman bounded toward them. Stiletto heels ground and stomped onto the street. Every thud was a juggernaut’s crash, and Billy’s feet were lifted from the ground by the concussion. He had to stop running for two seconds. Sprint. Then stop. Sprint. Then stop.
She was closing in, the shadow covering them both. He’d be squashed by her heel. He didn’t have much steam left for running.
“Keep going!”
Billy lunged ahead of her, Nelson taking the lead. Heavy breathing was at their heels. Billy caught movement in his peripheral vision. A man sprinting across the street. He tied a rope to a lamppost. Someone else tied the other end to a telephone pole across the street.
A tripwire.
Billy doubled his pace. “RUN LIKE FUCKING HELL, NELSON! SHE’S GOING DOWN!”
With the bend and give of steel, the giant woman gave a cry and tipped forward. Mid-step, she couldn’t right herself. The fall seemed to take seconds. She reached out, her palm smashing into another skyscraper, but she couldn’t catch herself. Shards of glass and structure tumbled down. Nelson dodged the edge of a steel beam, a concrete gargoyle and showers of glass. Blood sprayed them, slicking the streets.
WHUPWHAM!
The woman’s body fell through the street to the subway beneath them. Her legs jutted out of the hole, her fishnets and pumps pointed at the sky.
Billy and Nelson stopped, out of breath. They looked at each other and back to the woman half underground.
Nelson gasped, “She struck her head on that building, and it took out half her face. Christ, that’s where all that blood was coming from. And there’s something else.”
“What?” Billy looked to the sky, up the street, behind them, in the cars wrecked about the road. “Is something else coming? Where?”
“That giant woman is from a movie. I even remember the tagline. ‘
Five hundred feet and only fifty dollars
’.’”
“But that’s impossible.”
The vision of the exploding man replayed in his mind’s eye. “What about the others we’ve seen? The embalming guy and that priest collecting skeletons—and the flytrap head people.”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember off the top of my head. But the woman looked exactly like the movie. Pink fishnets. Red stiletto heels. Oh yeah, and also really fucking tall.”
Billy dabbed at the gash on the side of his head with his t-shirt. He eyed the tower where Jessica was hiding. Together, they charged toward the building. A beckoning voice stopped them. “Hold up a second!”
A middle-aged man ran at them with a younger kid who was maybe eleven. They were the ones who’d tripped the woman. The older one had to slap the boy over the head. He was staring at the woman’s g-string, her hind quarters jutting up from the street.
“Show some respect, Christopher Alan Meyers.”
Christopher lowered his head, blushing.
“The city’s gone to shit, huh?” the man said. “You boys okay?”
They were making fast progress to meet them until the flytrap heads pounced on the two strangers from a nearby alley. “
I can smell what you’re thinking, I can smell what you’re thinking, I can smell what you’re thinking, I can smell what you’re thinking
,” they repeated in unison, the grunts and squeals of flesh-craving monsters.
The boy was dragged back to the alley by the monsters, his screams ending in seconds. The older man chased after the boy, and he too was forced into the throng of monsters. The creatures tore through the man’s face and crunched the skull to feast on his brains.
A brain eating brains.
That’s fucked up.
“Shit, we’re next!” Billy cried out. “You know what we have to do. We have to hide in Corporate Tower.”
Nelson was already ahead of him. He was at the entrance, working around four yellow taxis that had plowed into each other. Billy charged behind Nelson and snuck into the revolving doors. Billy thought fast, jamming a nearby chair into the last section of the revolving door to wedge it stuck. The hands of the flytrap heads punched and clawed, but the Plexiglas wouldn’t give to their force. The black marble eyes hidden in the folds of cranial tissue bent. Conspired. The flytrap teeth clanked and ground to no end.
“What floor does she work on?” Nelson asked, a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. “I know you’ve told me before. I just want to get away from those creatures out there. Each and every one of them.”
“The fourth floor,” Billy said. “But I don’t think we should take the elevator. The power could go out and I don’t want to be trapped in there.”
The main hall was empty. No bodies or blood. Billy figured anybody who could get out booked it the moment the monsters arrived.
The elevator dinged beside the fire exit.
Billy stood, waiting.
“What’s coming down?”
“Maybe it’s somebody else like us.”
The elevator opened, and it was empty. They each released a sigh of relief. Billy heard his cell phone beep. Someone had left a voice mail message. He checked it; it was Jessica. He listened and returned the call. It was answered on the first ring.
“Jessica, are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said, overjoyed to hear his voice. “Are you in the building?”
“We barely made it.”
“Who’s with you?”
“Nelson. Now tell me where you are exactly.”
“I’m on the third floor in Dr. Schuler’s office. He’s a dentist. But be careful, there’s an intestine guy out there.”
“An intestine guy?”
“I know it sounds insane.”
“Like a giant hooker or people with flytrap heads?”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind, we’re on our way up. Be safe up there. I love you.”
Nelson normally would’ve chided him for saying “I love you,” but he was too busy eyeing the five flytrap heads staring at them through the window with hungry eyes. Billy took the lead up the stairwell. The stink of recent death, like a metallic fog, carried to them. With each step, the stench increased. Billy worried about Jessica; she was at the center of it all. When they reached the second-floor landing, blood dribbled down the steps.
Billy glanced at Nelson. Nelson nodded and said, “Yeah, I know. That's some rough shit.” They couldn’t avoid walking through the blood, so they trudged on in the red drizzle. What they couldn’t ignore was the heap of corpses at the bend of the third floor. Their bodies were punctured and gouged. Something had been driven through their bodies. The looks on the corpses’ faces proved they saw it coming too.
Nelson grimaced when he stepped on someone’s hand with a squish. “I’m so sorry, man. What a terrible way to go.”
“It could’ve been us,” Billy lamented. “And we’re not out of this yet.”
They entered the third floor. The first door to the left was Dr. Schuler’s office. Billy tried to open the frosted-glass door, but it was blocked from behind. “Jessica, are you in there?”
“Be quiet,” she warned. “I’ll let you in.”
After the sound of chairs scuffing the tiles, the door was opened wide enough for them to slip through. Billy hugged Jessica close to him, so tight she asked him to ease up. “I just have to know you’re really okay. I’ve seen too many people die today.”
“Me too,” Jessica said with tears welling in her eyes. “I’m so lucky you’re here. I love you.”
Billy kissed her again and again. “I love you too. We’re going to make it through this. You won’t believe what we’ve seen.”
“Is it more unbelievable than attacking intestines?”
“I'm not sure.”
Nelson went to work rebuilding the barricade. Billy joined him. When they were satisfied it would hold up to an intruder, they sat on the only remaining couch. Nelson closed his eyes, resting. Jessica searched for something to bandage Billy’s head.
“What do we do now?” Nelson asked. “They’re out there, we’re in here, and that dome is blocking anybody from leaving the city. They have us cornered.”
“Has anybody tried calling the police?”
Jessica said from the other room, “I called 9-1-1. I only got a machine. It’s a message saying to stay in shelter. They’re not taking calls.”
“Figures,” Nelson said disdainfully. “When we really need them, where are they? Unavailable.”
“Can you blame them?” Billy defended the police since his dad used to be a cop. “They could be dead for all we know. This isn't a normal crime spree.”
Jessica was disheartened. “You think all of them could be dead? Every single cop?”
Billy didn’t want to scare Jessica. He was scaring himself with the facts. “I can’t say. We’re cut off from everybody. It's impossible to know for sure.”
“You’re a meter man,” Nelson joked. “You should know what to do in these situations.”
“Yeah,” Billy shot back, “I’ll write the culprits a ticket. That’ll show them. Fifty-dollar fines for all of them. Maybe an impounding of their vehicle as a cherry on the top.”
Jessica returned with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed at Billy's head wound. “That’s a nasty cut. How did you get it?”
“A huge woman lifted up the subway car we were riding and smashed it to the ground,” Nelson said nonchalantly. “And Billy-boy cut himself on some glass.”
Jessica applied a torn piece of gauze and taped it to the side of Billy’s head. “A huge woman? Like the one I saw out there earlier?”
Billy decided to get the facts out and forget logic. “A woman seven stories tall attacked us in the elevated train.”
Nelson added, "And she might be from a movie.”
Jessica’s face tensed. She was on the verge of an angry fit. Billy petted her back. “Now wait, none of that is for certain.”
“You’re right,” Nelson admitted. “It just looked a lot like the woman from the movie: the clothes, the size, the stomping around like Godzilla.”
“Enough of that talk,” Jessica demanded. “First, you say the suicide bomber from yesterday was from a movie, and now you’re insisting the woman you’re talking about is from a movie too. I think Billy was onto something real. It’s terrorists.”
Nelson guffawed, “Listen to yourself! Brains eating other people's brains were attacking us on the streets. A man was touching people and the blood exploded from their bodies and then they were filled up with embalming fluid. A man dressed as a priest was using a mega magnet to pull the skeletons out of bodies. We could get shot through the fucking glass window the same way. These aren't things any human being, never mind terrorists, could do.”
Jessica bunched up against Billy, clinging onto him for comfort. “Tell me this isn’t real, Billy. There’s a plausible explanation. Something real. Not monsters from movies. Tell me there’s a way to end this.”
He was at a loss. “How can anybody except God explain why this is happening? Who could know? Maybe the Internet.”
“You’re right,” Jessica agreed. “That’s a great suggestion.”
“I was kidding.”
Nelson chimed in. “No, you’re right, man. I’m sure someone’s written something about all this. Maybe there are reports on YouTube.”
“Where’s a computer?” Billy asked. “The one in here is smashed.”
“In my office upstairs,” Jessica said. “We have to go back up there. I know it’s dangerous, but we have to try.”
Billy caressed her hand. “Me and my big mouth. No, you’re right. We just have to be careful. We have to try anything to survive.”
“Wait.” Jessica rushed out of the room. She returned with a container of liquid Novocain. “Here it is. Now let’s go.”