Authors: Alan Spencer
The glazed, off-yellow eyes pierced into Billy next. “
Be ready for a trip back into the city when they arrive, Billy…
”
The corpse stopped talking before it could melt. Everyone stared at the body, astonished. Nobody moved or breathed. Billy was forced to break the silence. “I told you the dead were talking to me. You should listen to what I say. Stan, let’s do what Andy says. Gather everybody. The monsters are on their way. It’ll be hell on the streets soon.”
Stan blinked and returned to the moment. “Y-yeah. I understand.” He uncuffed Billy and patted his shoulder. “I’m so sorry about all of that. I hope you understand why I didn't believe you.”
“No harm done.” Billy smiled at him. “Let’s protect the survivors. Everybody who can fight, let’s get them armed and ready to take on whatever's on the way.”
“Go get your ribs taped up real quick,” Stan insisted. “Then join us. I’m assuming you’re ready to fight too. Your dad would be proud of you. You managed to piss me off and make me agree with you all within ten minutes. Pretty impressive, boy. Keep it up.”
Billy said, “Then let’s get to it.”
He left the tent and scavenged for the medical unit. Jessica was sitting on a cot alone, the abrasions on her arms taped up. She was spaced out until he sat down next to her. “What happened, where did you go? I heard a big commotion. Is everyone okay?”
Billy explained what had happened, and the battle they were about to prepare for.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ted searched the aisles of Piggly Wiggly for raw meat. He cut through the canned goods section, the baked goods wall, and caught sight of the glass display case of various meats. He shoved the push-cart into the employee's only side of the department. Ted piled beef, filet mignon, T-bone steaks, porterhouse steaks—and any meat that contained blood into his cart.
Now you’re thinking.
Play by their rules.
It occurred to him that the movies were alive, so why couldn’t they be stopped the way they had been in the movies as well? The climax of
Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at
the Funeral Home
involved the caretaker of the cemetery, a Mr. Ruden Duvenick, filling a truck full of bloody meat mixed with weed killer to poison the vamps. The vampires were so attracted to the blood they didn’t pay attention to the chemical additives. Then they melted into ruby red puddles and soaked back into the earth where they belonged. The sequel, if Dennis Brauman hadn’t shut his movie company down financially, would’ve involved their blood seeping through the cemetery earth and covering a new set of nubile corpses and turning them into morgue vampire tramps.
It would’ve been a film worthy of Paul Naschy.
He scooted fast to the lawn and home care section and added six cases of liquid weed killer to the cart, the kind where the bottle attached to the end of a garden hose. Ted was near the back exit to load his truck when a titter froze him in his tracks.
“You’ve had your fingers in a lot of dirty pies, haven’t you, Mr. Fuller? Pies you had no business sticking your fingers in, you nasty man.”
Ted peered over the chip aisle and caught two tufts of singed hair bob from a blackened scalp. The smell of cooked flesh permeated thick as did the sickly sweet aroma of freshly baked pies. Smoke continued to issue from Mr. Baker’s body. He didn’t know how to respond, so Ted kept quiet.
“Where do you think you’re going, huh, Mr. Fuller? Count it on your fingers, my friend. How many women had you cheated on before your wife left you?”
How does he know about that?
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The ragged and mean voice shot back, “
Yes you do!
You were quite the handsome movie director in your day. You filmed me, Mr. Fuller, and you fornicated with many of my victims on the set. Nina Hayworth. Rebecca Kelly. Jenny Kurtis. Oh, and Shannon Klenklen. She was quite the hot tomato. They were all in my pies. Yet somehow you felt so sorry for yourself when Katie divorced you. You stank of disgusting, dirty pie. Katie could smell it too. The rotten pie tells all!”
“Would you quit saying that?” Ted was growing guilty and scared of where the conversation might veer to next. “What do you know about me? You’re from a movie.”
“I’m as much a ghost hidden beneath this shell as I am a movie character.” He played his free hand down his charred face, the other hand hidden behind a rack of corn chips. “The dead know everything about everybody, including you, Mr. Fuller. The ghosts of the dead wish nothing but harm to the living. The dead know magic, and they’ve possessed many of your films to bring terror to the ones we despise.”
“Then what the hell do you want from me?”
Mr. Baker stepped into complete visibility. He clutched a long-bladed steak knife, at least seven inches in length and two in width. “I want the dirtiest piece of meat from your body for my pie. It’s a delicacy—your tender meat. The juiciest meat, Mr. Fuller. May I ask you to unbutton your trousers? One cut, and I’ll be done. You’ll never hear from me again…
unless it
can grow back!
”
Ted was backpedaling. He knocked over a display of 2-liter soda bottles. He turned and bolted when Mr. Baker bounded for him.
“MY PIE MUST BE COMPLETED! If you keep running, I won’t let you sample it when it’s finished.”
Ted’s shoulder blade was sliced by a knife. He yipped in agony and landed on his back, the pain blinding him for two seconds. Then the reality was upon him. Mr. Baker crouched above him. He was working the button of his pants. “Come on out from in there!”
Ted pushed off from the floor, crawled backward and gained a four foot separation from Mr. Baker. He scrambled and searched for a way out. Blood trailed down his shoulder, warm and quickly turning cold. The charred baker came at him again. “You’re playing hard to get, Mr. Fuller? I thought people loved pie.”
He struggled to return to his feet, using the shelf behind him for support. He touched a row of store-baked bread wrapped in cellophane. Cookies in plastic containers came next. And then his life-saving weapon: baked pie. Ted held up the cherry pie, the surface speckled in sugar crystals.
“What is that?” Mr. Baker said, backing away. The pie was to the baker what a crucifix would be to a vampire. He shielded his body from the pie. “Inferior goods! Keep them away from me! Don’t touch it. Drop it, Mr. Fuller. That pie’s an abomination. It’s no good for anybody. I consider it poison—POISON!”
Ted tore the top of the box and poked his finger into the cherry filling. He ate a quarter of a piece. “It’s so good. You shouldn’t knock it before you try it.”
“I’m not eating that trash, and I’m not cooking you with that shit in you!” Mr. Baker pointed the knife at him. “I’ll come back for you, Mr. Fuller, when you’ve had a chance to excrete that awful dessert from your body.”
Mr. Baker rushed from the grocery store, fear and disappointment playing on his face. Ted released a sigh of relief. He dropped the pie and licked his lips. “Thanks for saving my life, pie.”
Mr. Baker feared other baked goods and their subpar quality. He considered store-bought pies the ultimate sin. Any dessert without human flesh, or organs, or blood was toxic.
I should’ve thrown it at him. Why didn’t I think of that? He could be dead instead of still out there.
He remembered the end of his film. A group of local bakers banded together to murder the villain, but in their shop, one uses a shotgun, and Mr. Baker lands on a shelf of cooling pies. The pies sizzle and burn his skin. The man’s outer exterior is destroyed and his true self is revealed; the baker is a zombie who exists on human flesh. He was cursed by another baker upon his death for running many of the mom and pop bakeries out of business when he stole their recipes and opened a mainstream bakery in the community. A gypsy reversed the curse and allowed Mr. Baker to finally die from the shotgun wound he received. Ted admitted the plot was ridiculous, but that was the genre and what put cars in the drive-in.
He said he was as much a ghost as he was a character from my movie. Why would ghosts want to be characters from B-horror movies?
The answer was in the devastation around him. They couldn’t reap so much terror and destruction by becoming Abbott and Costello or Groucho Marx.
Ted returned to his shopping cart. He wheeled it back outside to the Ford truck. Outside, he expected the relief of fresh air, but it was warmer now. Ten degrees warmer, he thought, and it would only get worse. The oxygen was depleting by the minute.
He began tearing through the cellophane wrapping and hurling wads of raw meat into the cab. Fat grains of greasy meat wet his hands. “I need more than this. This isn't enough.”
Barely half the cab was filled.
Vampires like blood.
He checked his watch. It was eleven-twenty.
It was time to visit the local blood bank.
The Chicago Blood and Tissue Donation Center was sandwiched between the all-night Five And Dime Laundry—empty now—and The Salvation Army. The city was deathly quiet. He hadn’t encountered another person in blocks, including corpses. He saw what looked to be a body dragged somewhere, the streaks of blood ending in Otto’s Garage. Mr. Baker was hard at work on his next batch of pies, he assumed.
Ted entered the waiting room of the blood bank. A receptionist sat in a chair, her body limp, her head dangling backward, her neck chewed in one big bite. He carefully walked into the back hall. The donation rooms. The storage rooms were in the back. A padlock had been broken.
Don’t tell me someone’s already stolen the blood.
It would make sense. Talon marks clawed up the door and the padlock. Refrigerators with glass doors were raided, many of the blood samples stolen. Ted knew the vampires were the culprits, but they were so erratic in their seizure, they left many samples behind. He collected the remaining blood packs, many covered in sticky blood.
Apparently somebody couldn’t wait to indulge.
He rushed in and out, in and out, with arms heaped in blood packs. Ted split them open with his keys and poured them into the raw meat stew. After the red gravy covered every inch of meat, he dumped in the liquid weed killer. Ted returned to the blood bank to double check if he’d left any blood behind. He was stopped in the waiting room by the dead receptionist. She was barely audible, every word a cough of blood out her open esophagus.
“Wait…until…midnight…I know…
uuu-whup
…what you are…trying…
graaack
—
graaag-graaag-gruuughaaaack
—to do.”
“Why wait until midnight?”
He couldn't believe he was asking the corpse a question. Tonight had been one guilt trip after the next, and a confusing and unbelievable trip at that. He wasn’t prepared to let a corpse tell him what to do unless he understood why.
“Answer me! Why wait until midnight?”
Doris, according to her name tag, didn’t move to reply. Her face was motionless. Dead.
“I’m sorry, Doris. You deserve respect. Nobody deserves to die like this.”
“Thank you,” the corpse finally replied, making him recoil in fright, and she laughed. “Sorry, I had to do that. The monsters, you see, the ones from many of your films, are striking soon at Navy Pier. Many survivors are holed up there. The monsters are waiting until midnight to stage a mass assault. That’s your chance to destroy the projector. Andy Ryerson wanted me to tell you this.”
“Andy Ryerson—my God!”
Doris’s face melted in wax globules to reveal the white skeleton beneath. The rest of her oozed from her sleeves and skirt until the bones crumbled down, the skull striking the carpet and rolling underneath the desk.
Ted stared at the human mess on the floor until he snapped out of the moment. The monsters would attack Navy Pier.
What if I can’t destroy the projector?
He parted the front blinds of the window and kept his eye on his apartment two blocks south of him. His room light was on. The profile of four vampires and the flicker of the projector reels assured him reaching his apartment wouldn’t be an easy task.
“Looks like I have no choice but to listen to you, Doris.”
Ted checked his watch.
Fifteen minutes to midnight.
Chapter Thirty
Sheriff Roger Elliot approached old man Red’s farm. The cows that used to be in his pasture were absent, as were the goats and the chickens that used to be in their coop. This was now a farm only by appearance, not function. The sheriff was called to the farm to address the screams heard around the property. Six people had disappeared in his town, and a town like Cold Creek being so close-knit, six disappearances had the residents locking their doors at five o’clock and keeping their kids off the streets.