B-Movie Reels (20 page)

He grew furious at the swarm, at Jimmy for putting them in the woods, and at the failure of logic to answer why locusts were glowing green and eating them.
 

Mary-Sue buckled to her side and faltered, and when he moved to help her, a dozen mouths bit into his back and tore through the fabric of his shirt. Spurred by pain and his blood infused with adrenaline, Andy made a split-second decision. He hoisted her up into his arms. He charged up a hill with the locusts chewing the skin from his shoulder blades. He couldn’t swat at them with his hands full. Many others joined in, taking turns biting at his deltoids and scalp, taking razor sharp pecks. Blood trickled down from his hairline and across his eyes and mouth.
 

At the top of the hill, a pond reflected the stars. Then the surface was obscured by a brilliant neon green haze. Still being bitten at every angle, he was left without any choice, so he dove into the water.
 

“Stay under,” he told her. “They can’t get you under the water!”

They separated once they sunk below the surface. The locust swarm was muffled from above. How long would it be before they left, he wondered, if at all? The need for air drew fire into his lungs. He combed the water for Mary-Sue, but he couldn’t find her, the waters so thick and dark at this time of night. He thrashed and kept searching, trying to deny the fact he was essentially drowning himself.
 

He’d been under a minute, or maybe thirty seconds. He lost all concept of time, and he was gasping to stay under longer, but also suffering from the dire need of that precious gulp of air.

Facing reality, he swam to the surface, stuck his head out, and breathed in and out, and two of the locusts stung his nose and eyebrow. He launched back down, back into the darkened waters. The escape route was a mistake, he realized. They were vulnerable here. The locusts’ muffled din made it impossible to think. He couldn’t plan beyond their hideaway under the water.

A set of legs flailed nearby, and Andy paddled toward them. Mary-Sue clutched onto him, and they anchored each other in the water. They waited, staring up at the green lights that wouldn’t leave. He wanted to apologize for sending them both into an inescapable and watery grave.
 

The need for breath nagged at them both, and eventually they’d have to swim to the surface again, or else drown.
 

Chapter Ten

1

Lyle Banner, the evening mortician, sat in his office reading
The New Yorker
, and glanced up at the clock. It was 11:00 at night. He was in the basement of St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital, fifteen miles from James Ryerson’s house. There weren’t any new bodies for the first three hours of his shift except for what was stored earlier in the day. He expected Tim Weathers, a corpse courier, to arrive any hour with a fresh delivery. He’d heard from the grapevine the bad news about Cal Unger. Deputy Stafford disclosed tidbits about the man’s death. He was found in a dug-up grave, dead, but the details of how and why were left undisclosed.
 

He put down the magazine and swigged the rest of his coffee. The novelty mug read “Trust Your Mortician.” He eyed the hallway monitor screen—no one was coming. The rest of the hospital was busy with ICU patients and the spill-over from the Green County hospitals. St. Mary’s Mercy Hospital was comprised of four floors: emergency room/ICU, OB, PEDS and a recovery unit. The basement floor was the morgue and boiler room. Lyle would be lucky to encounter more than a handful of people tonight, living or dead.

Lyle checked the monitor again.
Time for a cigarette break. Bastards won’t let me leave my post, so I’ll make do with my situation.
 

He lit a Camel and took a long drag. “Ah better, always better.”

Lyle turned on the corner fan and opened a window to allow the smoke to escape. Bart Adams, mortician supervisor, claimed he could smell the smoke in the air, but he never pursued it. Bart had performed many night shifts—“Shifts with the stiffs,” Bart called it—and understood how boring and long the hours could be.
 

Lyle brewed a fresh pot of coffee and performed a quick check on the bodies in back. He entered the back room, which was separated by a solid black door marked “Personnel Only.” The floor was tiled white, the walls mother-of-pearl. The double sink was adjacent to the plastic gurneys where the corpses were removed from body bags, tagged, and then filed into the walled slot to await further transport.
 

“Hello, dead people,” he laughed dryly. “Roll call begins in five minutes. You guys stay in your shelves for the time being, okay?”

There was a click from the bottom row, and Lyle froze.
 

He eyed the slot, startled.
 

This wasn’t the first time someone had been placed into the slot alive. It happened fifteen years ago, a month into his internship. Carl Wassermann, a barber who’d suffered heart palpitations, was found belly down in his shop and not breathing. The ambulance crew marked him dead, but when he was in the slot, the man awoke and cried out, “GET ME OUTTA HERE NOW!”

The only difference between Mr. Wassermann and now was that the person inside didn’t beg to be released. Lyle’s fear changed into anger. Pranksters—especially drunk teenagers short enough to crawl into the slots and shut them on their own—were known to hide in the nooks so they could steal formaldehyde and huff it. Kids liked to pass out, and Lyle supposed it was better than self-asphyxiation, but it still wasn’t healthy.
 

Lyle went about inspecting the other slots, but then there was more shifting throughout the rows. He opened the closest one in curiosity, and gasped at the woman inside of it lying beside a male corpse.
 

She was startled at the intrusion. “Don’t hurt me, please.”

The woman turned to him. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Magenta red hair flowed down her fair and unblemished face. Blue eyes gazed up at him, frightened and innocent. She was wearing only a bra and panties, both of which were made of sheer white fabric. Lyle made out the pink of her nipples, the buds raised around the areolas, and looking south, he was drawn to her strawberry bush. He didn’t mean to look, but the woman didn’t seem to mind.
 

“W-what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.” She lowered her eyes timidly. Her lips pouted, glossed over in cherry lipstick. “I woke up a moment ago. I’m really scared, mister. Can you take me home?”

He searched for a lab coat to drape over her body even though he enjoyed looking at her, a lean one-hundred and fifteen pound body with C-cup breasts. The breasts were taut enough that you could stick a pencil underneath them and it would fall. Her thighs were perfect curves, her ass snug against the sheer fabric. The legs were smooth from a fresh shave.
 

Snapping out of his appreciation for her body, he asked, “What’s your name, you poor thing? We’ll get you help, okay?”

“I’m Jenna,” she replied. She reached out and placed both hands on his shoulders. “You’re so nice to me. What can I do to repay you for your kindness?”

“Um, nothing.” He was confused by the question. “Someone’s in deep shit, though. How this happened, I’ll find out and make sure their ass is shit canned. I’m so sorry. Do you remember how you got here? You must be so scared.”

Jenna pressed her mouth against his in a kiss that started softly, and then she forced his hand down the front of her panties. She whispered, “Comfort me.”

He trembled at the sudden closeness of the woman. She was wet between her legs, and Jenna urged his fingers inside her. Lyle grew hard instantly. It’d been two weeks since he’d slept with his wife, and Rebecca didn’t look anything like Jenna. There was at least a seventy pound and a fifteen year difference, and unlike Jenna, it wasn’t this easy to turn her on.
 

They kissed harder, and he was fingering her. The woman rolled her head back and moaned in pleasure. “You’re so good to me…
soooooo good
.”

The squeak of metal sounded and four of the other slots on the wall opened. Women dressed similarly to Jenna and equally as attractive closed in on him. The only difference between the four and Jenna was the blood pasted on their lips and dripping off of their chins.
 

“What, what the hell is this?”

“
Shhhhh
,” Jenna whispered, running her tongue over his lips. “It’s okay.”

Lyle threw her aside, gasping at what had been done to the corpses inside the slots. Their necks had been chewed into ribbons, the jugular and femoral arteries tapped dry.
 

The five women blocked the exit, with Jenna taking the lead. “Dead bodies don’t fight back when we take their blood. It’s so much easier hunting dead prey, you see. The living always make such a big fuss.”

Jenna’s incisor teeth extended out the soft gum tissue and turned into jagged weapons.
 

He put it together.
 

“Vampires?” He uttered, not believing it. “No—
no!
What are you? Why are you here?”

“The dead don’t refuse us their blood,” she reiterated. “The freshest dead necks are waiting in the morgue, but your neck is fresher. I can smell it running in your veins. I’M HOT FOR YOUR BLOOD!”

The five swooped upon him at once, like a synchronized mob. He reached for the exit door, but he was shoved backward onto the floor, handled by the neck. He shrieked at the sight of their leather-like wings protruding from their shoulders and extending the length of the room. Talons shot forth from their fingertips. Their eyes brightened from blue to demonic red. Muscles enlarged their bodies, their smooth and slender forms now covered in black reptilian scales.
 

The five bore down on him, and after moments of blood being sucked from every limb of his body, his heart finally ceased to beat.
 

2

Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at the Funeral Home
ended an hour ago, and now the lone zombie in the living room loaded the next reel:
The Freezer.
The five other corpses stood vigil behind the boarded windows and continued to let the film play out.

The shot pans over a warehouse marked with a brown and white wooden sign that reads “Pilsner’s Best Ale Production and Distribution Company, Delaware City.” The sign was underscored with the line “Delaware’s Coldest Brew Since 1905.” Darkness obscured any details of background or city surrounding the warehouse, but the Super 8 quality of film was the culprit, not the night itself. The scene cut to inside the factory where stacks of crates stocked with longnecks were head-high. A man in his mid-forties in a blue khakis work uniform with a name badge marked Willis Salter was passed out on the concrete floor with dozens of empty bottles strewn about.

“Salter’s kid is drunk on the job again,” one of the two factory overseers said. The talker was near retirement age with wild gray hair and sucking on the end of an unlit cigar. He wore business suit, being the brains of the operation. “Dwayne Salter hasn’t set foot in this bottling plant for six months and he hasn’t seen his piss-off boy screw his chance at a promotion. Willis expected a position like ours at the big table of hot shit stockholders without putting in his dues. Damn it, we earned our titles. Willis doesn’t even have to work assembly line duty. He just has to see that no one breaks into the plant. It isn’t that difficult. The apple fell far from the tree and then someone squashed it.”

The second person, a foreman with a smug face and in the kind of same uniform as Willis Salter, scratched his balding hair. He was Stan Kudger, a long-time manager of operations. “I’m just a peon, Mr. Piedmont, but I know better than to screw myself out of a good job. The yeast, it smells like pizza, and I get a discount on the beer—the best beer in Delaware. I get health benefits, too, and I’ve never drunk on the job. This is a great job.”

Mr. Piedmont knelt on his haunches and slapped the boy’s cheek. “Wake up, son.”

Willis groaned and turned to his side.
 

“How many times does this make it, Stan?”

“Drunk for the sixth time in less than two months,” Stan said, after thinking a moment. “And the place was robbed the second time he was blitzed out of his head.”

“I’d hoped he’d die of alcohol poisoning by now,” Mr. Piedmont griped. “But Mr. Salter owns the company, and he won’t give up on his son. I was afraid of this. Our stock has plummeted since that robbery. Some hack reporter got a picture of ol’ Willis sleeping around a stack of bottles when the robbery was on the public news. I was surprised they didn’t get a picture on the front page with his thumb up his ass, the jack-off. We’re losing business because of this fuck-about kid.”

Mr. Piedmont removed a plastic baggie from his suit pocket. “This should do the trick.” He emptied the white powder onto Willis’s nose and fingertips. “Snorting cocaine on the job is not only signs of malfeasance, it’s illegal. We’ll keep it quiet, have Mr. Salter come down here and reprimand his boy in person, then we’ll see how many chances this kids gets.”

“But Willis will argue to his pa. It won’t work.”

“That’s not all we’re going to do,” Mr. Piedmont replied, pointing to Willis’ legs. “Pick up his feet, I’ll take his arms. Carry him to the freezer.”