B-Movie Reels (12 page)

“Is it too late to clean this up? Shit, we’re wasting our time, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know. That’s why we’re checking it out. It’s our job to clean up messes, isn’t it?”

“We didn’t find anyone from the truck,” the man whispered, hesitantly edging toward the pipe. “If anyone finds out about this or gets hurt, we’re in deep shit. The government doesn’t have clearance to use civilians to transport the chemicals. These guys will probably contract every form of cancer…if we find them.”

“Shut up about it. We’re scientists. None of this concerns us. We’re here to clean up and that’s it.”

The man moved alone to the giant pipe. He aimed a flashlight inside and turned back to the man Andy guessed was his superior. “I don’t see anything but floating turds.”

The hairy muzzle of a rat extended from the dark shadows, and then the camera cut to the man falling backward with his arm missing, howling in agony. Blood turned the algae-colored water pink. The man screamed, splashing in retreat with one arm. “
My arm. Shit! My arm!”

It was obvious the man’s real arm was tucked under the suit.

The other worker was soon attacked, the top of the rat’s head at the bottom of the camera bobbing as it hunkered down upon him. The rat chomped on the man’s head, the neck stump spurting three foot tall jets of blood.
 

Andy jotted notes on his pad and prepared himself to endure the rest of the movie.
 

3

“Wayne, are you inside?” Sheriff O’Malley called out into the empty store. The word on the dispatch was that Wayne had locked an intruder inside the walk-in refrigerator. “Wayne, answer me. Where are you?”

The call from Doris and Bruce Hamden’s house about the group of dressed-up dead men had already put him at an uneasy alert and now he was dealing with this. Those six idiots set themselves up for potential danger. Doris wanted to blow them away for tramping across her garden. What would the next person do who crossed paths with the convincing group of walking corpses? And now Wayne called to say there was an intruder in his deli. How many weird things were going on in Anderson Mills today?
 

As he entered the eatery the smell troubled him. It wasn’t deli meats or anything stagnant. It was powerful, though, like the smell of iron in blood. The lights were out, but there was enough late afternoon daylight filtering through the windows to make sense of the shadows. He withdrew his 9 mm handgun. He stepped over to the front counter and combed the area, the gun in his hand.
 

“Come out with your hands up. You’re under arrest.”
 

Nobody replied.

A series of noises stopped him in his tracks:
drip
,
thap
,
drip
,
thap
,
ka-thud
,
ka-thud
, and then the grating whir of a garbage disposal choking on its fill, the blade cutting through metal or bones by the sound of it. He observed a hand sticking out from behind the wall, dangling limp on the floor. He hurried to investigate it. Someone was in the back of the store at work, but what work was the operative question. With the scent of blood, the curious noises and then the garbage disposal’s churn, he suspected the worst.

He crept to the wall beside the rack of chips and squatted to check out the hand. Now that he could see more, the sheriff cringed at Wayne’s torso. The blood trail behind Wayne’s upper half made it obvious he tried to crawl away even after he was cut in half.
 

He dared to peer into the back room. A hanging body dripped from a headless stump. Body parts lined the table top, blood oozing from the edges and streaming into the drain. The meat grinder catcher was heaped full of grainy meat threads and folds of flesh.

Coughing on his own disgust, he forced out the order, “Freeze asshole!”

The intruder popped out at that moment, dressed as Wayne would be on an average business day, a white butcher’s outfit with a black apron over the chest and legs, but this man was burly and well over three-hundred pounds. His black greasy hair was in tangles, and his patchy beard stained in random spurts of blood and flesh. The butcher guided a coil of long intestines into the garbage disposal undeterred by the command and was about to shove a severed foot through as well when he finally paused to study Wayne.
 

Eyes bulging wide, his face burning with incredulity and venomous anger at the intrusion of his important work, he barked defensively, “MY CUTS!”

“What did you say? No, forget it. Put the weapon down and get your hands up right now. Shut up and do it! Or, or I’ll shoot you!”

The man didn’t register the commands. He brandished a clever and drove it into the body hanging upside down, hacking and slicing until he wrenched out the innards handful by handful—the butcher winning the awkward game of tug-of-war when the pieces seemed to be stuck but finally gave—and slopped them onto the floor. The sheriff noted the pile of clothes at the exit door, and they looked like what the workers at Eddie Stolburg’s slaughterhouse wore.
 

He’d killed all of them.

“How many people have you slaughtered? You crazy son-of-a-bitch, get those hands up right now! Drop the clever—
I said drop it!
”

It was in that moment he read the name embroidered on the man’s breast pocket: Jorg.

He insisted again, “Jorg, you do as I say, or I’ll shoot you.”

Jorg didn’t budge at the commands. He stroked his blood-sodden finger down a line of butchering knives and stopped at the twelve inch steak knife. He clutched the handle and removed it from the magnetic strip.
 

“Put it down—
now
!”

Jorg’s grin took shape, those awful words ripe with spittle and insatiable hunger, “MY CUTS!”

Wayne pulled the trigger, seeing no other course of action. He was shocked by the damage a single bullet inflicted. A plume of red exploded from the butcher’s chest, and it blew a cinder block sized hunk of flesh from his back that spattered out like wet dough. The skin unraveled along his abdomen as if it was all tied together and the knot had been undone, and the man collapsed in one sickening PLOP. But he wasn’t dead yet. The eyes leered at Wayne, studying him, looking him over. The man clasped tighter to the knife and raised it as if to throw it when the sheriff emptied three more rounds on pure instinct. One shot struck the hand holding the knife, liquefying it into finger and palm debris. The second lodged in the abdomen with little reaction, but the third pierced through the man’s forehead and erupted, spitting a gallon of blood against the wall, finally immobilizing the chef.

Shaken, but snapping out of it, Wayne quickly called for back-up and an ambulance.

Officials from the Green County police department accompanied the sheriff to comb the scene for evidence, the crime scene itself confusing as it was unique. The deli was busy with seven crime techs total, each careful with their steps, the evidence splattered at every corner. Crime scene investigator Kyle Redding stepped up to the sheriff with an initial report. “The assailant apparently murdered the workers at Eddie Stolburg’s slaughterhouse and drove their remains here in a stolen truck to butcher.”

“Was he going to eat them?” The sheriff inquired, shaken at the idea of the overweight man feasting on the flaps of meat heaped in the meat slicer’s tray. “Christ, he cut Wayne in half. What could he have used to do it?”

“Uh…
gentlemen
.” Another investigator named Frank Garrison approached them, a beefy man much like Jorg but handsome in a rugged, authoritative way. “I believe this is the murder weapon.”

Frank held up a scythe in his gloved hand. The blade was seven inches long and wicked from the glare in the overhead light.
 

“He must’ve brought it here,” the sheriff suggested, his belly twisting at the thought of it being used on poor Wayne. “Who in the hell is this guy? I’ve got my deputies with your men at Eddie’s slaughterhouse, and they’ve pretty much found the same thing.” He pointed at the body hanging upside down from the ceiling. “More of these bodies were drained of blood like slaughtered cattle, and even the receptionist was murdered. Ironic thing, none of the cattle or money was stolen. The rest of the place was left alone, aside from the workers.”

Garrison added his two cents. “He has no identification whatsoever.” The man’s rotund face turned white. He couldn’t look them in the eye during his next comment. “We haven’t gathered any fingerprints, not even from the knives he used or from his own fingertips. The man’s hands come up smooth, no markings or indentions at all. It’s strange.”

“And impossible,” Redding scoffed. “Maybe he’s put something over his fingers, or he…he, well, I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s a logical explanation.”

The sheriff massaged his eyes, his concern welling up into what could possibly bubble over into a professional breakdown. “I’m going to have to tell Wayne’s wife about this. She’s not going to take it well. Goddamn it anyway.”

Garrison studied the murderer’s head, half of it blown away. “Kyle, look at this. His skull is empty, and we’ve found no brain matter anywhere in the room. You shot him in the head, obviously.”

“Only because he was coming at me after I shot him three times. Crazy lunatic acted like it didn’t faze him one bit. And I saw the exit the wound, and there was no brain or skull material. It’s like nothing was in there. And he kept saying the same two words.
My cuts
. It didn’t make sense. It reads “Jorg” on his breast pocket. Maybe that’ll help identify him.”

Redding became entranced with the inner workings of the man’s chest. “No remains of the heart either, as if he never had one. The sternum looks ill-formed, cartilage instead of bone. There are no organs, just fatty tissue and muscle. At the back of his head, there’s no brainstem connecting from the spine. I’d like to perform an autopsy. It’s like the body isn’t real. He’s an anatomical anomaly. Any college professor would love this discovery. What if there are more people out there like this?”

“This is as incredible as the James Ryerson incident.” Garrison was genuine in his remark. “We still don’t know how he grafted those bodies together and mismatched people. And some of those people are still missing. It’s only been eight months. The incidents might be connected.”

“James Ryerson is dead.” The sheriff dismissed their line of thinking. He recalled one of the bodies at the Lawrence nightclub twitching alive with three arms attached to one side of the body, the other side a human head lodged where the shoulder should’ve been. He shot it in the head to end its misery, more out of sheer repulsion than sympathy. “This isn’t connected. I want a better answer than this. A logical one.”

The sheriff recalled how the Hamdens had spotted six men dressed as corpses.
 

What the hell’s next
, he thought.
Anderson Mills is really going tits up today.

“The FBI swept the Ryerson incident under the carpet, but the two incidents are within eight months of each other,” Redding said again. “Anderson Mills is about to reach its peak season with tourists. This needs to be wrapped up double quick for their safety.”

The safety of our money
, the sheriff thought. “Then what are we going to do about this mess?” He watched another investigator pile organs into a body bag, but the worker couldn’t figure out what parts matched what body and cursed under his breath in frustration. “And is this the only man responsible for these killings? We haven’t asked ourselves that yet. Could one person do this?”

“You two are missing the scientific implications. This man’s body is an oddity.” Redding lowered onto his haunches and pivoted the man’s flimsy head toward them. “There’s no brain, just the components for the man to see and to breathe. He’s fused together by wads of fat, tissue and cartilage. Yes, there could be someone else responsible, and the real question is, are they like this man too?”

The sheriff dismissed the scientific talk. “Just get this place cleaned up. Take the body to your lab, and call me when you’ve performed an autopsy. I’m interested in what you find, yes. All of this unsettles me, though. I pray this man dying was the end of this horrible incident.”

Chapter Six

1

“Shoot the Coors can, and this time don’t miss!”

Jill Hammock lined up the end of the Remington Buckshooter with the Coors can on top of the dock’s wooden post. Her long-time friend and boyfriend, Kevin Brenner, chided her on. “Five shots, this is your last chance. If you don’t hit this, you have to drink another beer. You’re already on your sixth. This game can last all night.”

She ignored his comments. “I’m the best at aiming. My daddy taught me, the fat-ass lush. I’m the master.”

“Judd’s a drunk with an M-16,” Kevin laughed. “It’s impossible to miss with that, drunk or not.”

They’d been drinking and fishing throughout the day, and then Kevin brought out the Remington Buckshooter from the back of his Pathfinder. He bragged that he’d shot down fourteen bucks in a month’s time and that was without hunting gear or a scope. Jill enjoyed fishing, but the idea of hunting was less appealing. The blood and watching the deer die was different than hooking a fish and stowing it in a cooler to later clean and eat. Hunting was barbaric and less skilled than fishing, she believed, plus it was fun for her to dip her feet into the water at the dock’s edge and catch a buzz and talk with Kevin. He left town through the week transporting beef from Eddie Stolburg’s slaughterhouse, but he was on vacation and wouldn’t have to report to work until next Monday.