B-Movie Reels (32 page)

He collected a silent breath. The mob’s voices had dispersed and were growing faint. He eyed the house one more time and checked to be sure the horde was gone before climbing back down.
 

3

Sheriff O’Malley evaded the attackers in the woods with no problem. He was at the perimeter of the house already, but he hadn’t stepped out into the yard yet. He kept his eye out for Ned or Andy. How long he’d wait, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps ten minutes, he decided, and then he’d break into the house and destroy the projector himself. The bodies that spoke on the dock, he was convinced James was the source. The sheriff was a man of deduction and logic, but this wasn’t a petty crime or a simple felony. This was the mass slaughter of a small town and the assailants weren’t even human beings.

He wasn’t up for this kind of action. He felt the agony of a pair of broken ribs and a cheek wound that itched and burned whenever the breeze kissed it.
 

The sheriff listened and vaguely heard in the background the mob that pursued him earlier. They were scattered about the woods determined to find them.
 

He craved a cigarette or a shot of whiskey. If Tabitha was still alive, he’d love a round in the sack, but the thought only left him guilty and lonely. She was gone forever. It hadn’t really sunk in until now. Everyone in Anderson Mills was dead, according to Ned, who seemed to have his head together despite the terrible events tonight.
 

“Where are you guys?” he muttered, tapping the ground with his foot impatiently. He checked his watch. “You have five minutes before I leave you behind.”

He clutched the Mossburg pump-action shotgun and kept his breathing soft. He assumed that since he hadn’t heard any screams or howls of pain that nobody else had been killed. Whether that was a fair assumption or not, the question of waiting continued to gnaw at him.
 

He lifted his head up.

Caught.

“
Shraaaaaaaagh!
”

“Damn it.”

The shadow flew low overhead, and before he could react, he was tackled and pummeled to the ground. He scrambled to fight back, and sent his fist blindly ahead of him. It connected with a clammy face already slathered in blood.
 

“Mary-Sue,” he gasped in horror.

The skin around her throat was visible to the red and purple muscle tissue beneath. The jugular vein was torn and dangling. Her eyes were wide open, dead. He shoved aside Mary-Sue’s corpse and waited for the vampire to return. Too late. Hands picked him up by the collar, and the ground disappeared from his feet in an instant. He was turned upside down and carried into the night.
 

Chapter Sixteen

1

The corpse stationed at the projector listened to the din from outside and didn’t flinch. The next film the zombie chose was
Termite Invasion
, and this time, the undead figure played only the first reel:

Scientist Luke Mason, biochemist, locked his office door. He was packing his things into many boxes in a hurry. “Fuckin’ Dean thinks I’m using school funds to promote my own research. I’ll show them what I’ve been doing with their money.”

Luke opened a Styrofoam box and emptied it into the duct system. “These termites were bred to end the burning of forests. Why burn and pollute when you can unleash these guys to eat up the land without pollution? It’s environmentally sound. Damn them for cutting my research—damn them all! Now I have no retirement. They’re even taking my pension.”

The sound of scraping and beating wings echoed with a metallic twang. Dr. Mason smiled and waited, rubbing his hands together. “It’ll take them hours to spread out, but only minutes to tear into anything made of wood.”

Dr. Mason furrowed his brow when the din became louder in his office. “What are they doing?”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

He lunged for the door when a black cloud exited the duct. They swarmed around his body in a badly animated haze. He clawed the air and then curled into a ball, horrified at the turn of events. The camera cut to the poster of a dissected termite and then the taped-up boxes around the room. Blood spattered the walls, and then Dr. Mason struck the floor. The camera panned up close to his face, the skin missing and revealing bone clotted with gristly meat.
 

And then the black haze disappeared back into the duct system.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

Satisfied with the reel, the zombie removed it to play another film:
Soul Escape
.

Jake Ackerman exited the cabin near Copperhead Lake. A woman’s body dangled in his arms, the axe he wedged into her sternum still dripping with blood. He moved in a fast walk up the trail to a parking lot where his heavy-duty truck waited.
 
Miore bodies were heaped in the bed; five so far. They were all from the Davies family.

He stared at the young woman’s face. “Jennifer Davies…I’m so sorry. None of this was your fault. Your mother and father were into witchcraft. They’d bred children for the sole purpose of resurrecting dead spirits and giving them your bodies. It’s the Davies curse. You were born with ghosts in your souls, and they want to escape. If your soul escapes, it’s really the ghost that escapes, not you. It’s better you’re killed now. You won’t commit the atrocities these ghosts want to commit.”

“It’s too late!” Jennifer’s face came alive, and she spat a mouthful of blood into his face. “It was too late when we were born, you fool! You can’t stop us!”

Jake staggered from the truck, wiping the blood from his face.
 

Jennifer dislodged the axe in her sternum and threw it inside the truck. “You can’t stop the dead, you asshole!”

“Do you realize what you’ll do? There won’t be any line between life and death. You can’t do this. Please, see the reasoning of my words.”

“It’s beautiful—” Jennifer laughed, “—to be immortal. Fuck the reasoning of your words.”

Blood spilled from her eyes, nose, mouth, and then a straight line split open down the entirety of her body, as if the flesh were unzipping itself. She screamed in blood-curdling agony as the flesh ripped, and her skeleton shrugged it off. The camera flinched back to Jake, who stared in disgust, cringing with tears welling in his eyes. The camera returned to Jennifer, but this time she was a blood red human skeleton bobbing on strings visible on the screen.
 

“You have no flesh or blood. Think about it. Why live again if you can’t have a real body? You’re just bones. What do you get from taking this girl’s body?”

“I can rebuild myself again.” The camera closed in on the jaw clicking together to make words. “And I think I’ll start with you. I like your muscle tissue, maybe the skin on your face. I’ll take anything I want, you idiot!”

Jake sprinted into the woods in horror.

Then the camera cut to the bodies in the trunk.
 

2

The intake of breath was a stabbing jolt in his lungs and chest, yet Ned managed to convince his body to keep running. He was clearing a good distance from his attackers. He prayed Andy and the sheriff reached the house safely. They were the last ones that could end this horror.
 

Numerous trees burned behind him. The flames lit up the night. Somebody would notice the wildfires eventually. The smoke in the air, the billowing black clouds, the distress in Anderson Mills would all be obvious. The din of slobbering voices and blood-thirsty cries forced him to retreat.
 

The house became visible. He skirted into the backyard. The shadow of the gazebo surrounded by the wide garden was promising; nobody was there. He sprinted low into the gazebo and lowered to his knees. He eyed the woods behind him, double checking the perimeter. The flicker of torches and the snarling faces were missing. He’d either completely lost them or they were hiding in the woods.
 

He surveyed the backyard and didn’t locate Andy or Sheriff O’Malley, but he caught the flicker of white light inside the house through the open slats of the boarded up window.
Who the hell boarded up the windows?

The .22 rifle encouraged him. He could blow through the added security. But
whose
added security was it? This wouldn’t be a hit-and-run operation as he’d planned. He decided not to wait for the others. The time to destroy the projector and the house was now.

He maneuvered out of the gazebo and was startled by an approaching figure. The man was dressed in a black suit tattered at the shoulders and stained with soil. The face was bluish-gray, and the eye sockets weren’t intact. The eyes were dark squares in the face of bone. Worms writhed from its open sinus cavity. The teeth clicked against each other, and it extended its hand out to him. It was from another movie, he knew for certain.
 

He opened fire on the dead man, blasting the creature’s face away and sending bone fragments onto the gazebo. Two more corpses climbed over the short wall and tackled him after the body dropped to the ground. The .22 rifle was wrenched out of his grip by a set of dead bony hands. Ned grabbed the two zombies by their necks, one hand for each, and tightening, tensing with all his strength, squeezed right through tissue that spread apart like wax. One of them stuck their fingers in his mouth, and the phalange caught on his tongue, tasting of mold.
 

The other choked him back, the grip startlingly tight. Ned gasped for breath, feeling weaker. He thrashed his legs and tried to kick them off, but the creatures were unaffected by the blows. Ned’s only defense was to squeeze harder at both their necks. He used his fingernails to grind against their muscles, digging, gnashing, ripping and tearing through the soft tissue, and working so hard, he snapped their necks from the shoulders, completely tearing his way through. Both heads struck the ground and bounced into the garden.
 

He collected his weapon and breath. He studied the area for other corpses. One stood guard at the back door.
 

Ned took careful aim, fired, and struck the corpse mid-torso. It broke in two with a rise of dust. Even after falling, the corpse’s upper half struggled to reach the door again. This time, Ned charged the body and stamped on its head. The first blow shattered it into pieces, the skull breaking like a pot fresh from the kiln.
 

He banged the butt of the rifle against the door, but it was secured from inside. Furious, he kicked and drove his shoulder to batter it down, but the efforts were useless.
 

Then neon green painted the sky.
 

“SHIT!”

Ned watched the horde close in; hundreds of blinking specks—demented and spastic locusts—lowered to ground-level. In seconds, they’d be upon him. The buzz was deafening, so overwhelming he couldn’t think.

The door couldn’t be opened, and there was nowhere else to hide.
 

He waited for their attack.
 

3

Andy climbed down the tree and sprinted to the house. The creatures were nowhere to be found, but they could be heard bustling about in the woods in every odd direction. On the way to the house, two gunshots resounded from ahead. Hearing the shots, he was mad at Ned and the sheriff for not offering him a weapon.
 

He closed in on the house after a quarter of a mile of running. He stopped in the front yard, deciding where to go. The wash of white light inside the living room slowed him down. He caught a shadow moving in the room and a face peered out at him between two slats of boards.
 

He heard the sound of breaking of glass, then the weeping willow behind him whooshed into blue flames.
 

He tripped in his haste to dodge the fire.
 

Chainsaws by the dozens whirred behind him, and a collection of murderers set upon him. The firelight crudely carved the menacing faces, each staring him down with the intention of dismemberment.
 

He raced to the front steps.
 

He tried the door. Locked. Barricaded. The straight jackets entered the yard, moments from reaching him. He scrambled to the opposite side of the house. A series of hatchets and axes—even the blade of an electric saw—missed him and struck the house. Gunshots shattered windows but missed him.

Surrounded with nowhere else to race to, he climbed the side drainpipe. He was half-way up when the mix of robed elderly and the insane clamored below him. A knife stuck into the back of his calf. He lost his footing, but he grabbed the roof’s gutter and lifted himself up to safety.

He ripped out the knife and tossed it from the edge of the house, infuriated.
 

Now where the hell am I going to go?

He feared peering over the edge of the roof to check if they were climbing up after him. The rattle of aluminum and the patter of feet against the house confirmed they were on their way up.

There was no chimney to climb down into the house. He could jump from the other side of the roof, but how would that be any safer? And now that his calf was bleeding, his mobility was limited. What would he do if any of them reached the roof? He wished for the slightest weapon, even the meat tenderizer he’d lost earlier. The whir of chainsaws and power drills made him dizzy. He clutched the roof with both hands to anchor him in place.