B-Movie Reels (24 page)

He lowered to his haunches—awkward since his zipper was undone and he was hanging limp—and scanned the ice’s surface for the shotgun. He located it in a second, loaded one of the two shells from his front pocket, and when he raised the muzzle, the black-plated face appeared before his with an ear-piercing hiss.
 

The blast removed her head.
 

He stood in place and absorbed the shock. It was freezing cold. He zipped his pants back up. He ripped the two ice shards from his arm and angrily tossed them away.
 

He loaded his last cartridge into the chamber.
 

Let’s leave this fucking place.

The shifting on the ice drew him to alert mode again. The sheriff traipsed the ice and finally arrived where the blue eyed man had fallen. The man was on his feet again, but he stood awkwardly, as if dizzy. The blue eyes in their mashed sockets focused on the sheriff and drove deeper the fear that was already brewing inside of him.
 

I can’t take any more punishment.
 

He darted through the fog and kept running. The blue-eyed man pursued him for minutes, but the fog was too thick and the sheriff randomly changed directions to throw the stranger off course. The slick surface of the lake changed to earth again without him seeing it before it happened. Frost covered leaves crunched underfoot, breaking under his weight. He charged up a hill, and through the trees, he located the edge of a road. He eyed the darkness in both directions. The area was clear. The green aluminum sign yards up from him read “Black Hill Woods and Recreational Center.”
 

“Thank God,” he laughed. “Thank you, God!”

The police station was a mile north up the hill. He sprinted without a conscious effort, encouraged by a shred of hope. He pedaled harder, and when he arrived at the parking lot, the anticipated relief backfired into horrid astonishment. The two police cruisers in the parking lot were left in shambles; every window was shattered, the chrome dented and eaten through, and the paint chipped along every inch. The windows of headquarters were also broken, the blinds bent and defiled.

He forced open the ravaged wooden door, see-through in sections where the wood had splintered. Inside, the walls were corroded, the dry wall flaking apart from numerous punctures. Lynn Morgan, the dispatcher, sat behind her desk face down. He shrank at the sight. The half of her face not against the wood had been stripped of flesh, the bone glistening red. She was practically a skull with her eyeballs intact and her scalp in pieces, her curly blond hair somehow still in place.
 

This can’t be
.

He hurried down the short corridor of offices, desperate to find something to help him. Officers Edward Bilks’ and Owen Wilkinson’s bodies were strewn in the hallway, their bodies picked of skin down to the bone. He only recognized Edward’s face from the bloodied mustache curled at the ends with handlebars. The sheriff pictured that horrid face smoking a cigar and puffing smoke rings and glaring back at him through the eyeless gummy sockets and laughing, “Smoke ’em if you got ’em, and I’ve got plenty of ’em.” Owen was the newest member on the force, two years and closing in on his third. In his hand, stripped bare of flesh, he clutched a Glock pistol.
 

“They didn’t stand a chance,” he muttered.
But what did this?

He leaped through the hall when he saw his office door was open. He kept it locked, and the only person with access to it was Tabitha. It wasn’t uncommon for his wife to drop in, often to bring him a homemade lunch: chipped beef sandwiches, coleslaw, and baked beans were his favorite.
 

He feared the worst, entering his office. The edge of her penny loafer shoes drew him into the room. The red summer dress was torn into shreds, her stockings mere strands of fabric, the same as the flesh beneath them. The tiles were slick with a wide pool of blood. He hunkered into himself at the sight of Tabitha’s face. There were simply no features, even the sockets and sinuses had been evacuated.
 

“I’m so sorry, Tabitha,” he cried, knowing the words were useless to her. It was too late to save her. He stepped over her body and tried the phone at his desk. No dial tone. He tried the radio near the dispatcher’s corpse, but the machine was destroyed, the circuit boards gutted and eaten through. He caught the body of an insect next to Lynn Morgan’s Reebok shoe. He plucked it from the ground between two fingers, and it broke apart. The thorax crunched, the inside hollow, but a spurt of green fluid ejected out of the insect with an oversized mandible. It appeared to be a locust, but he hadn’t seen one so brittle and green before. It couldn’t be native to Anderson Mills.
 

He struggled to decide how to approach the situation. First, he armed himself by storming into the weapons storage and looking over the glass display of three 12 gauge shotguns, a 22. Remington Rangefinder, a Walter PPK pistol, a Derringer automatic rifle, and a collection of Desert Eagle handguns. He strapped the Remington Rangefinder complete with a night scope on one shoulder, loaded his holster with a Desert Eagle, and carried a fully-loaded 12 gauge in his left hand.
 

“I’m armed, now what the hell do I do?”

He wasn’t used to this kind of action, not even armed robbery or aggravated assault. Petty theft and drunken brawls were the brunt of what he faced, not flying demons, blue-skinned men who could make everything freeze and hurl ice shards at you, or a mallet-toting madman, and now, flesh-eating locusts to boot! The phones were down, his cell phone blown up, and now that nobody pursued him, it was deadly silent.
 

Then he recalled Tabitha carried a cell phone. He barreled back into the room, picked it up, and tried Kyle Redding’s personal number, but the phone’s battery was dead.
 

The sheriff hurled the phone against the wall, and it shattered. “What the fuck am I supposed to do now?
Goddamn it!”

Was he alone against the strange monsters cavorting about Black Hill Woods? The sight of Tabitha’s exposed skull dug into his mind, repeating and breaking his heart over and over again. He covered her body with his police coat and stepped out of the room, guilt and repugnance colliding in his head. The sheriff cleaned up his cheek wound. He bandaged it with gauze and tape from the first aid kit. Underneath the peroxide he stored a fifth of Jim Beam, and he swigged it to dull the pain from his battle wounds.
 

Tabitha was dead and so was anybody else that could help him fight whatever had poked its ugly head into Anderson Mills. Deciding his next move, he snatched Officer Wilkinson’s patrol car keys. He believed that was the only car left somewhat undamaged in the parking lot. Then he collected his weaponry and drove back to Silver Lake.
 

The fog had lifted in small patches along the road, and he kept his brights on in search of anything else that would cross his path.
 

3

Andy rubbed his hands up and down his arms, trying to warm himself. “Are you cold? That last wind was freezing cold.”

Mary-Sue failed to reply before the clap and shatter of wood resounded near the front yard. They skirted from the front steps of the farmhouse. “That came from the cattle pens, didn’t it?”

Andy sucked in a nervous breath, believing they were under attack again. The swarm of neon locusts was gone, but had he wrongly assumed they were out of danger? There were no lights on in Mary-Sue’s house or the stables, pitch dark everywhere, leaving any potential enemy disguised. Leaves blew up from the ground blown by invisible gusts and their bodies circled overhead until they lost their momentum and collapsed one-by-one.

He listened hard, making up for lack of sight, and he heard a shuffle and a scurry of steps on the grass. None of the animals stirred, not even the horses in their stalls.
 

Then it happened again, the crashing sounds.
Crack-crack—thump!
 

Another series of boards collapsed, and this time a cow cried out.

The last cry was cut short by a dry, disconcerting snap.
 

Mary-Sue lunged into the darkness toward the disturbance, and he followed at her heels, fearing the possible outcome of the next seconds. They were running the border of the cattle pens when the darkness parted enough and shed attention on the horrible sight. Reeling from the violence, Andy struggled to stay in place as he absorbed the bodies of white and black spotted carcasses strewn about in heaps along the acreage. Their innards snaked out for many yards, uncoiled and broken. Ravaged torsos revealed rib bones that jutted up, broken and helter skelter, as if snapped by giant hands.
 

He pushed her toward the farmhouse, taking control of the moment. “Run inside the house!”
 

He sent Mary-Sue on her way, but then he was staked in place, studying the scene, fascinated, glued to the unreal image. In deeper shadows, it lurked. The glint of oil-black eyes stared back at him unblinking as it continued to devour another cow’s body. The face was the size of half an adult cow’s body, so giant. The bloodied chubby face hissed and flicked blood from its whiskers onto the wooden fence, taking offense at being watched. The culprit was a life-sized rat with sandy-colored fur and teeth the size of human fingers. Its midsection was a plump and distended pot belly, the skin stretched to near breaking capacity. Pink foam built up at both sides of its mouth as it gnawed through a cow’s stomach cavity and ripped an intestine in half with its claws.
 

He stared at the monster for a special reason.
 

There was something familiar about the creature.
 

It resembled the rat in his movies!
 

“Andy, shit, get inside!” Mart-Sue seized him by the shoulder and forced him into the house when the rat whipped its tail and smashed the wooden fence into tatters. He ducked and barely avoided being struck by a jettisoning plank. Together, they retreated to the doorway and slammed the door shut, locking it behind them. The rat barreled into the door, right on their backs. The wood forked down the middle in a deafening split.
 

“It’s not going to hold!” She was frantic, standing in limbo between the front door and the kitchen. “Where do we go? What do we do now?”

CRACK!

The wood divided in two and a pair of pink fingers wrenched the pieces backward to reach through to the other side.

The black eyes glared at them, menacing and contemplating its moving prey.
 

“Where’s the basement?”

She shoved him to the left, through a small hallway, and then into another door. Following her, he swung the door closed behind him, assuming it was the basement. Mary-Sue picked up a 2x4 and wedged it into two metal slats at each side of the door, securing the barrier. “The plank’s strong oak. My mom made my dad install it after a burglar robbed our house.”

The front door was ripped from its hinges, the pieces drumming against the floor and quickly settling. She clung onto him, quivering. He did his best to protect her. He was the one closest to the door, and if that monster broke through, he’d be first to face those snapping teeth.
 

Clack
,
clack
,
clack
, the rat skittered across the wood, its nails striking the floor. They could hear something being launched through the front window with a great shatter. The beast was angry that its food was missing. Next, it sounded like the kitchen was raided, and in moments, they heard refrigerator fall over onto the floor with the sound of broken tiles and the give of beams. They heard the sound of pipes breaking as the sink was uprooted, water splashing the ground in high-pressure torrents.
 

“What is it doing?” Mary-Sue whispered to him. “It’s throwing a fit.”
 

The creature in the kitchen froze.
 

She tensed up, waiting for its next move.
 

Click.
 

Click.

Click.

The nails tapped against the floor.

Andy scavenged the stairs for anything useful; a tool, a weapon, a way out. The darkness didn’t lift, except for a sliver of light from the door’s crack. Along the right side of the stairs, a shelf was installed into the wall stocked with laundry detergent, fabric softener, mouse traps—not that any of that size would do any good against the beast—and kerosene. Panicked as to what might come in the next moment, he poured the kerosene through the crack of the door.
 

“What’s that supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.” He looked over the oily mess. “But I heard that rats don’t like bitter-tasting things. Maybe it’ll keep it from the door. The barrier won’t hold on its own.”

They heard the rat stomp through the hallway. It paused before the basement door and sniffed the floor. It recoiled and backtracked into the living room and waited. But how long would the monster’s patience last?
 

Together, Andy and Mary-Sue retreated deeper into the basement. Mary-Sue sat on top of a washer and curled her legs into herself. Half her face was visible behind her knees when she whispered, “Why did you stare at it for so long outside? The thing could’ve killed you.”