Authors: Alan Spencer
The recently dead eyed them through the barricade holes. Fingers and arms reached through, pounding the wall and shaking the foundation. Boards were loosened from their posts. Glass was shattered and window frames taken apart. Their moans carried, though they didn’t form words. Billy couldn’t figure out why they didn’t demand they release him.
“We have to use the back way,” Billy insisted. He tugged Jessica by the arm, not meaning to hurt her but doing so anyway. “There isn’t any more time to talk about it. Let's go!”
They swung through the maternity clothing section and hooked a left around the bath accessory aisle to an employee’s only room. The double doors shot open, and they were met by a group of zombies. Were they the good ones or the bad ones? They’d decimated the blockade of trash barrels and wooden planks. In their panic, those already hunkering down in the store had forgotten to double check the back exit.
Closer, the walking dead approached them. One seized his arm. He brought his teeth down upon his arm and tried to bite down.
Jessica screamed, “These aren’t our friends!”
The corpse lifted up his hands in defense. “Hey just kidding, just kidding! Don’t shoot me in the head, please.”
“Andy?” Billy gasped. “Is it you?”
Andy guided them through the open doors. “I have ten minutes in this body before it collapses. I’ve summoned enough spirits to maintain these bodies, so time is short.”
Billy had to ask, “How come the bad ghosts don’t melt away like you?”
The eyelids were half-obscured by sagging flesh when they turned to meet Billy’s. “There are many more evil spirits than there are good spirits…our soul energy is much weaker than theirs.”
Jessica’s mouth hung open. “Oh, so I see. That explains everything.”
Andy pointed with a gnarled finger; every second, the body continued to rot: cavities crusted, darkened, and tightened and collapsed with feasting bacteria. The flesh seemed to give birth to maggots and earthworms. “We run through this back stretch behind the shops and leap from the edge of the pier and swim back toward the city. There you’ll find cars. I’ll follow you, Billy, and help you start any car of your choosing, and I will personally drive you to the destination. I have a vendetta, you see, against those flying bitches—and you wouldn’t understand, so don’t ask. Just do as I say.”
The plan wouldn’t be as easy as it was laid out. Billy declined to count the number of corpses that gathered around him—a literal army spilled from the shops. Jessica drew closer to him, closing her eyes and wincing softly. “This can’t be real. This can’t be real. We’re going to die. We’re going to die.”
Andy touched Jessica’s shoulder and said, “You have the best soldiers to protect you, lady. We’re dead—and don’t have a thing to lose!”
Billy and Jessica were shoved forward from behind. He wasn’t functioning except on instinct: move legs, move arms, breathe and watch out. Jessica’s breathing grew erratic; she couldn’t control herself. He tried to comfort her, but they were parted by the flooding of corpses from the Salty Big Pretzels shop's back door. EMTs, police—doing more to defend them dead than alive—and local citizens surrounded them.
“There’s so few left alive in the city,” a random corpse spouted, “if you guys die, surely the bone dome will be relocated, and everyone else in the country will be on the chopping block.”
“If that happens, there won’t be enough zombies to stop them.”
“Never mind, destroy the reels.”
“So stay alive!”
“No problem!” Billy shouted over the grumble and din of the dead. “Please, protect Jessica—she’s all I got left!”
Fire cascaded from the top of American Eagle Outfitters. The flames, spouting out like liquid to reach them, turned the dead into kindling, their flailing doing nothing to fan out the flames.
“I won’t let you go, Billy,” Andy said, dodging the flames. “The Pickler won’t harm you, I swear.”
The dead covered him when the flames came his way. He felt the heat and experienced the chemical smell, a caustic incendiary burning. Overhead, from each side, the dead covered him like a tarp. He couldn’t see through the bodies and appendages. Billy had lost Jessica; even her screams had subsided.
“Where’s Jessica?” Billy kept demanding. “I can’t let her die, you understand me—do you understand me?”
Andy said, “She’s being protected like you are. Now keep moving.”
Red demon eyes glowed at his feet. A naked woman had squirmed through the pile and latched onto his legs. The grip was vise tight and attempted to crush the bones of his ankles. A boot swung down and stamped her bulging belly, spitting out an ant-like creature that deflated and leaked brown juices.
“What in hell was that?”
“It’s from a movie about aliens implanting themselves in expecting mothers and using the mothers’ bodies as a vessel as a weapon to terminate humanity,” Andy explained. “They call them
Preggers
! Equipped with man-stopping strength, testicle-stomping fury—”
“Okay, enough! I get it!”
Billy treaded through strewn bodies. The zombies were somehow holding their own. They reached the edge of the dock. The covering of undead flesh released him.
“It’s time to swim, Billy—”
A scythe swiped Andy’s head from the neck. The head flopped over the edge of the dock and into the water. Farmers surrounded them, mixed with more of the schoolgirls—one with a mace swinging over her shoulder, another with a samurai sword, another with a chicken wire garrote, and five with a machete in each grip. They called out: “I bet you still want to fuck me!” “His dying wish will be a quickie!” “I’ll give him head—his own!” “I’ll throw a pair of my panties in his coffin as a souvenir!”
He believed the zombies were fighting bravely, but so few of the walking dead were left, maybe three dozen, and that meant Jessica was no safer than he was.
This plan is going to shit.
Overhead, the five hundred-foot hooker kicked and bludgeoned through buildings. Her abdominal cavity was hollowed out, the flaps of skin hanging out like an open coat, her body dripping bloody rain. She was closing in, beginning to step into the harbor, her eyes intent on him.
The flytrap heads weren’t in clear sight, but their fierce bone-clacking was audible. It sounded like they were walking in droves of fifty. The Pickler was a burning pyre turning the stores into fiery pillars. A man in a baker’s outfit was stoking the flames to cook bodies, the bodies themselves speared through the anus and mouth by modified stop signs. He saw the Intestinator wrap his intestines around five zombie heads and snap them with derision and pleasure. A steamroller finished off the fallen corpses, squishing and squashing them into paste.
From the harbor, the very edge of the dock, roaring waves foamed and crashed against the wood pillars. The dock was moments from being decimated. From the black depths of the harbor, a gaping mouth surfaced, the length of a freight car.
Billy shouted in horror, “It can’t be!”
The monster was a replica of a purple and blue betta fish, except enlarged to the size of a school bus. Scaled tendons reached out from the gills to try and knock Billy’s feet out from underneath him, but he jumped and rolled to avoid the deadly grip. Muscles rippled from each side of the fish, the fins branching with veins as thick as elevator cables. Its eyes were demonic red, clear globes sloshing with blood.
“BILLY, I’M OVER HERE!”
He caught sight of Jessica at the opposite end of the dock. He couldn’t reach her without combating the schoolgirls, farmers, the Intestinator, and perhaps the five hundred-foot hooker. Billy attempted to reach her despite the enemies, but the beta's tendrils wrapped around Jessica’s midsection, and she was sucked down into the brilliant-colored gaping jaws of the betta beast.
“JESSICA!”
He replayed the scene in his head. Was she chewed up, he asked himself. He couldn’t tell if she was swallowed whole or devoured.
Does it make a difference, the fucking fish ate her!
Billy backed up to avoid a mace smashing into his skull. The woman was bitter, spittle oozing down her lips. “You pigs always have a way of backing out of your commitments, huh? You’d knock me up and insist I have an abortion, wouldn’t you?”
Before he could respond, the force of the waves snapped a leg of the dock, and he was thrown into the black harbor with hundreds of monsters at his back.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Ted’s knees ached and his feet were filling with pinpricks waiting behind the row of vehicles for the vampire to check out his trap. She was interested. Human eyes disintegrated into blazing red globes. The smile somehow glowed in the dark, a mere stencil of a human prototype, but the lips were bent and jagged and much too long to be real. She was perched in the window, blonde hair caught in the wind flapping silky clean, though pieces of gristle and fat were clotted in the strands. The city’s outcries of terror were muffled from a distance, and Ted blocked it out.
This is all that matters.
Destroy the projector, destroy the monsters!
The blonde—Georgia, he recalled her name—flew down, her skin changing from flesh to black plated with a
plick-plick-plick
sound. The attraction—though sullied by the evidence of violence painted on her body—was erased. Breasts turned to flat muscle. Nails curled into eagle’s talons. She resembled a flying Draco lizard.
She landed onto the truck bed with a squish. Georgia was pleased with the spread: fresh blood from the blood bank and raw meat. She hunkered down on all fours grunting, gobbling, masticating, swallowing, slurping and mewling in ecstasy. He’d designed their pleasure moans to be exaggerated and pornographic when he shot the film. Sex was big in the late seventies, he recalled. Porn was serious cinema. Anything boasting naked female flesh, sex and a smattering of gore could sell in domestic and overseas markets. And that was another reason he quit films; the horror market had lost its heart and soul and guts and spine. He was bored with today’s films, though he had often wished—and finally got his wish, unfortunately—that the old days would return.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?” Georgia asked through a mouthful of pink beef that spewed blood with each bite. She could read his thoughts. “The good ol’ days of Stan Merle Sheckler? You’ve marketed so many films in your years, Mr. Sheckler, that nobody saw. Nobody would give you more than twenty-five grand to make a picture. That’s shit. Chump change. You fear obscurity, but look at you, you are obscure. A rarity.”
“That’s Dennis Brauman’s fault,” Ted challenged her, furious. “I did what I was supposed to do to entertain my demographic. I worked hard. Busted my ass. And Brauman’s rich religious ass canned my career.”
Why am I arguing with this bitch?
She pouted; the action was strange with her face greasy with raw meat. “Deep down, you wanted to bring us back to show him up, didn’t you? I showed Dennis something. I sure did.
Mmmhmmm
. I showed him something you’d loved to see.”
Georgia descended over him, picking him up under the armpits like an eagle would a field mouse. He flailed, moaning and groaning in fear she’d drop him from four stories high. She forced him through his apartment window and into his living room. He landed in their lair. Corpses were strewn on the carpet with their throats eaten, women splayed with their guts emptied and their flesh intentionally painted red—vampire art, he thought, what had also appeared in the film. She pointed with an extended pointer finger. “Look. Ahead of you.”
Dennis Brauman was barely recognizable. He was splayed standing up, naked from the waist down, his beige leisure suit top still on, and his chest torn through, his heart missing. “I told him how you felt, Mr. Sheckler.”
“Quit calling me that!”
“I told Dennis he had no heart,” she cackled, throwing her head back. She moved to the wall playing with Dennis’s hanging open mouth. She used his mandible to frame words. “He said ‘God would have nothing to do with such a parade of ugly humanity…sex, boobs, bush shots, dismembered body parts, foul language and movies designed by the dark recesses of the mind’, but I showed Dennis who he really was, Mr. Sheckler. I did it for you. You deserve redemption. This is your redemption. You thought people weren’t afraid of horror movies anymore. Now they’re real. Now they’ll piss and shit themselves because of you. You have accomplished so much by bringing us back.”
“No, no, no! I brought you back because I was confused. I had a contingency plan if something so crazy could work. I was going to blow you bitches back to hell with a shotgun. I seriously didn’t think playing the reels would’ve caused you to come to life. I didn’t believe it. I, I didn't.”
“Why did you have to go and say that?” Georgia released Dennis’s mouth, which dropped back open in a natural expression of shock. “You miss filmmaking, don’t you? You have plenty of new ideas. And so do me and the girls. Ideas that could last forever. Movies fade in time, and in this market, it’s one fix after the next, today’s new release becomes yesterday’s news. Your movies won’t be like that, Mr. Sheckler. Not while we’re around.”