Chapter Fourteen

1

The rodent’s arm bashed through a slit in the basement door, swatting for them with its nubby pink fingers. Andy stayed in front of Mary-Sue at the very back corner of the basement. The rat had them cornered, once it made its way through. The hinges snapped. The wooden 2x4 across the center of the door remained intact, but it wouldn’t hold for long.

The door was turned into kindling bit by bit. The rat punched and leveled its weight into the door with unrelenting power. Andy heard the door break in two, and the rat clawed the pieces behind him, clearing the way. The rat’s drooling maw snapped the center board in half and destroyed the door frame by its enlarged sides impacting against them. Wood crumbled in plaster-sized debris in its wake, and that fast, the rat was on the stairs. The shadows parted to reveal the monster’s teeth, each one slathered and wet by the slab of a tongue wider than a textbook. Saliva pattered the staircase. It whipped back and forth and forced its body through the door.

“It’s coming!” Mary-Sue screamed. “Do something, Andy. For God’s sake, do something!”

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” 

She scanned the basement for an answer. “Throw something at it.”

He picked up a laundry hamper and heaved it at the rat. It swiped it out of its way and hissed.

She scoffed at his weapon choice and discovered a baseball bat and heaved it next. The rat clamped down on the wood and broke it in half. 

The rat was poised to lunge down the steps at them. Its two front legs were up in the air, the fingers bent as gnarled weapons. The hind legs rippled with muscle underneath the sandy-colored fur and layers of extra skin. 

He forced Mary-Sue to stay behind him. He wasn’t sure what next to do, so he picked up a fire extinguisher and raised it. “Maybe this will scare it off?”

“Do it! Now, before it gets down those stairs.”

He extended the nozzle end toward the enemy, but before he could do anything else, the entire staircase collapsed. The rat was heaved forward, the round body spinning upside down and careening onto the concrete floor head-first in a spinning mess. 

Crick!

He winced after the bone’s snap. The rat’s mouth was a slit, trails of blood glomming down from both sides of it. Its eyes were silver buckshot, cold and distant. The body didn’t move. The white belly and legs were locked in the air as if caught in a mouse trap. 

Just like in Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana, Andy thought. The resemblance of the rat from the movie was uncanny. He couldn’t let it go as coincidence. 

Mary-Sue popped out from behind him and drove a twenty pound free weight into the rat’s skull. It gave under the weight, and the buckshot circles were spat out followed by globules of blood by the pint. She then cowered behind him at the mess. “I fucking hate those things! Disgusting even when they’re dead.”

He stared at the smashed-in skull. There weren’t broken fragments, just brittle pieces and no brain matter beneath. And then a noxious odor gurgled from the rat’s bowels and scented the air. It wasn’t the stink of feces, but cow carcasses. The smell was confirmed when the stomach deflated and the sack-for-a belly split open. Strands of red stained white and black spotted fur and digested innards stained the floor. 

“Fucking Christ!” She pinched her nose. “What the hell is this thing?”

“Let’s step out,” he suggested, taking her by the arm. “We don’t need to keep looking at this.”

The staircase was in ruins, but it was intact enough to tread one careful step at a time. Soon, they reached the top. As they came upstairs, he had to catch Mary-Sue in his arms when she slipped on the turpentine in the hallway. Moving on, he tried the phone in the kitchen, but it was dead—as he already knew, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity to check again. Mary-Sue rummaged through the drawers and selected a twelve inch carving knife.

“That thing’s huge. You carve turkeys with that thing or what?”

“Pumpkins.” She gave him a crooked smile. “Only pumpkins.”

He followed her lead, stealing a meat tenderizer. The idea of going up against something like a rat or locusts with a knife or meat tenderizer was ridiculous, and he knew it. “What are we doing, really?”

“It makes me feel better, okay?” She peered out of the window above the sink at the acres of dead cattle. “That thing stinking up the basement has killed everything. So much for the dairy farm and so much for my dad.”

He couldn’t deny the obvious. Jimmy Jennings had to be dead. He’d been missing long enough, and the bodies they discovered ravaged in the woods was another reason to believe the unexplained. “I can’t lie to you, Mary-Sue, but I can say we’re escaping this mess and getting a straight answer as to why that thing in the basement can exist. Let’s drive the hell out of here, okay? I left my cell phone at my house. I can call for help there. It’s worth a try.”

Her face was drained of color, the disgusted tears standard to the grieving package. She planted both hands on the sink, knelt over and threw up with a painful retch. She turned on the sink and flicked on the garbage disposal. She washed out her mouth and shook her head. 

“None of this adds up, Andy. Why are we even alive? We’re very lucky that rat stumbled down the stairs and broke its neck. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if it didn’t? I don’t want to die like that, not tortured, or, or devoured.”

Andy forced out the next words. “It’s out of our hands what’s going on. A logical explanation is too much to ask right now. We can guess all night or we can try and call for help. I’m sorry your father’s gone. He’d want you to be safe no matter how you two got along. Nobody can say where that rat came from or why the locusts attacked us. We’ll worry about it when we’re somewhere safe. Somebody has a shit-load of explaining to do, but for now, let’s get the hell out of here.”

She washed out her mouth again and wiped her face dry with a hand towel. “Okay.” She picked up the knife. “But I’m not going anywhere without a weapon.”

He lifted up the meat tenderizer. “You got it.”

They walked outside and checked each direction. He turned to Mary’s truck. The windows were smashed, the hood over the engine removed and the engine block was serrated by teeth-shaped markings. 

“The vermin destroyed the truck. Why would it do that?”

He was shocked himself. “I, well, I don’t know.”

“What do we do now?”

He studied the surrounding woods. So far, it appeared to be unoccupied. They wouldn’t get anywhere staying at her house, and now that they didn’t have transportation, they had no choice but to walk to his house and make the call from his cell phone. It was the logical choice, but also the dangerous one. 

“I guess we walk to the house.”

She grimaced at the suggestion. “I hope nothing else is out there.”

“Me too.” 

 

2

The walking corpses were on alert at the Ryerson house. Four manned the windows and the fifth one was stationed across from the blank screen. The decayed fingers scanned the reels to make the next choice after The Hospice Massacre ended. Stacks of reels were shoved aside, sorted through with haste, for the corpse wanted something more devious and devastating. The town would die, and after that, the surrounding cities and towns would follow. The spirits of the dead demanded a movie torturous and sadistic beyond reason. 

Titles identified by magic marker passed by with wavering enthusiasm: The Incredible Exploding Man, Revenge of the Basement Trolls, The Cannibal Brain, Nightmares of the Sandman, Copperhead Terror, The Laundry Mat Strangler, and then the bone and gristle hands clutched onto Escape of the Psychopaths. 

The corpse set the first reel and began the film.

Warden John Keely guided author Brett Waters through the padded cells at Longview Hills Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane. The doors were steel reinforced with a removable wooden slot to peep inside. Brett felt relatively safe being in the maximum security wing of the sanitarium. 

“I’m researching this place for a novel,” Brett explained to the warden who stared straight ahead indifferent to who he was delivering across the wing. “I want to really capture how it feels to be locked up and left in here, practically barricaded without any contact with the outside world.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of you,” Warden Keely said. “I saw you on a talk show or somethin’. Best-selling author, right?—forgive me, I don’t read anything except newspapers and requisition forms. Dr. Kiernan is a fan of yours. You write the mysteries involving cold cases, I remember. Yeah, the doc eats that stuff up. He’s been talking up your visit for days.”

“Great.” Brett was enthusiastic by the prospect. “Most people don’t want to talk to people like me. They think I’ll put their lives in print and embarrass them. So who’re behind those cells? Do you know much about them?”

“Just the juicy details, and I’m sure that’s what you’re after. I can’t say much about their childhoods or where they lived or what their favorite TV show was, except for Wayne Saunders. He loves The Andy Griffith Show and that Don Knotts guy.”

“Then start with Wayne. What did he do to land himself in here?”

Warden Keely adjusted his black-rimmed glasses and said, “Wayne’s simply insane. He lost his mind after he caught his wife sleeping with another man. They used to live in L.A. He strangled them both with the man’s prick still inside her. Then Wayne quit putting his time in at work and spent every waking moment for seven days straight whittling down on their bodies with a beveling tool. Thousands of specks of human tissue, organs, and bone were slopped on the basement floor. Neighbors began to complain of a stink and called the police, and the rest is history.”

“I’m sure there’s more to it than that for Mr. Saunders’ breakdown. A man doesn’t just snap like that, especially someone in such a high paying career. He lived in a two-story house, and in L.A., that’s pretty good. His wife was a background extra for a movie company. I’m sure the affairs she had weren’t the beginning of his mental deterioration, it was a long build-up of extramarital affairs. Just like the affairs probably whittled at Mr. Saunders, he whittled on his dead wife’s body.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” Brett smiled. “Who else is in this booby hatch, huh?” He handed the warden a hundred-dollar bill. “Speak up.”

Warden Keely pocketed the money. “There’s Bruce McGinty. Irishman immigrated with his father to become a blacksmith, and then the depression hit. Bruce, as a child, watched his mother and father starve and beg on the streets. Plumbing was horrible back then and feces covered the streets. Bruce survived by panhandling and pick-pocketing. Then he started to slit peoples’ throats for their money, and then it got to the point where he’d drag the bodies into a workshop. He’d use drill presses and molten-hot pokers to kill his victims. Sadistic bastard, really, and when they caught him, Bruce had broke into a local mansion and lined the iron barred gates with severed heads, painted every window and door with blood, and when he was located, he was hiding underneath a stack of human organs. They almost didn’t find him until they carted off the bodies from the crime scene and uncovered him. He murdered people for about six years, gradually working up from a petty thief to a cold-blooded killer.”

“How far are we from the exit?”

Warden Keeley nodded at the wall thirty feet from them. “Over there, sir.”

“Is Graham Williams here?”

“Graham Williams,” he whistled. “He’s worse than the two I mentioned. He’s an Ed Gein apprentice except on top of grave robbing, he’d break into people’s houses, cut off their heads, and then have sex with the noggins at his cabin in the woods. The mechanics are hard to picture. I don’t try. He lived south, maybe Alabama or Mississippi, which is a bad place to have sex with severed heads if you ask me. It’s so humid, but I guess if you’re insane enough to lop heads off of strangers and romance them, I guess the heat index is low on your list of concerns. The man hasn’t spoken a word in ten years.”

“That’s because he cut off his tongue,” Brett divulged. “He did so in order not to be interrogated. Many of his bodies remain missing. He’s pretty intelligent, actually. There’s something you don’t know about the insane. Even if you’ve lost your mind, you can still enjoy what you do—I know I do!”

Brett lifted up his button-up shirt, peeled back a flap of skin beside his navel, and worked out a razor blade. He swiped it across the man’s throat again and again with intense glee. Blood doused the walls in generous spurts, and then the inhabitants of each cell pounded the doors in delight and crowed to be released. Warden Keeley’s gargles ended when Brett punched him square in the face.

“Graham, where are you?” Brett checked each cell for an answer. Two pounds on the door, he threw back the wooden slot over the peephole, and there was his uncle twice removed. “There you are. You inspired me so much as a kid. You showed me the pleasure of killing. Like an art, you get better at it in time. I’ve worked up my writing career to get inside and meet you and to let you out. There’s a way through the duct system, and all of these people can escape with us. I need your help though, Uncle.”

He unlocked the door and an alarm clamored. “Others will be here soon, we must escape right now.”

Brett went about unlocking the other doors. “Outside in my car, I have more weapons. We shall live to murder again! ALL OF US!”

 

3

Ned darted through the lake, encouraged to move faster after overhearing the gunshots. Somebody was alive out there besides him, and they were armed. The ice was unstable, melting at accelerating speeds. The air had warmed, perhaps in the upper sixties, if not seventies already. The flying demons were gone. The wound on his backside kept bleeding, and there wasn’t anything he could do to stem the flow. Soon, he’d be too weak and dizzy to embark on the adventure of escape. 

He followed the voice that called out to him, but it had stopped. Ned scanned through the dark to make the best choice for a foothold. Many sections of the lake had completely thawed out. He stepped onto a circular piece of ice, each side bobbing up and down and threatening to tip him over. 

If I fall in there, I’ll suffer hypothermia. I won’t reach a hospital in time to be saved. 

He called out again, “Where are you? Are you still out there?”

“Over here,” an irate voice barked. “Careful where you step, I’m on my back and I can’t get back onto my feet.”

The voice was close, and he narrowed the search. The outline of a man spread out on a small island of ice formed out of the dark. It was Sheriff Douglas O’Malley on his back. “Sheriff, are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine when I get the fuck off of this block of ice and on solid ground again. Where am I exactly? Am I anywhere near land?”

He stepped around the block of ice that supported the sheriff. The dock was only yards away. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Hold on.”

He made it back onto land and picked up a walking stick—one of the many pieces that had broken off from the trees during the icing over. He forded back onto the waters, treading carefully on top of chunks of ice, and handed the sheriff the stick. 

“Paddle back to shore. It’s not far.”

The sheriff accepted the stick and carefully paddled his way back to land. Ned helped him off the ice and onto the muddy bank. The man collected his breath and he looked him over. “I thought you left town, Ned.”

“I tried. Things have happened that defy explanation since then, and I don’t know if you’ll believe me.”

“I’ll listen with an open mind. I’ve encountered those flying bitches, and I shot up the man who froze everything in town. Locusts attacked the station. My officers and deputies are all dead. They tore up the power and phone lines. They decimated the CB radios in the patrol cars. The roads were slick with ice, but I don’t know if that’s true anymore. Everything’s melting now. We might escape.”

“Not yet,” he said. The sheriff was probably the only person that could help him. “We’re not leaving until I finish something. Everyone in Anderson Mills is dead. What you saw at the station, the town is in the same shape. Every house was ransacked, and everyone was ravaged by bite wounds.”

He didn’t divulge the details of the corpses momentarily coming back to life and speaking to him, or that James was the one doing the talking. Shock and exhaustion weighed down the sheriff’s face, and Ned wasn’t prepared to take a risk of scaring him before reaching the house and destroying the projector first. 

“Everyone in town is dead, is that really true?” The sheriff’s face faltered. “How did we make it this long?”

“It’s not over for us. I’m not sure if I can explain this without confusing you. The source of this chaos is at my brother’s old house. It’s up the woods about a mile. We head up there and end this. I know what to do, but I need your help.”

The sheriff’s concern shifted to him. “It has to do with James, doesn’t it?” He hardened his face. “I knew there was something wrong with him. Murderer.”

“He’s not a murderer. It’s not that simple. He didn’t swap the limbs of those poor people at the comedy club. That was the work of dead spirits.”

The sheriff craned his neck at the sky, watching for the red specks to return. “I agree something supernatural is working against us, but what exactly do you mean by ‘dead spirits’? Nothing human murdered my wife or could remove her skin like that, and for so many people to be dead, this isn’t the work of a person. One of those flying things was a woman. They tried to seduce me,” he hung his head down. “They sucked me right into their trap. Then, they changed into a flying demon and attacked me.” He pointed at his cheek. “This isn’t a human being at work, no sir. I believe my two eyes, at least for now until we have to explain this to a third party. No one will ever believe it.”

“I believe you,” he said, knowing it wouldn’t make a difference. “And one of those women was out on the lake, and naked too. I carried her over the ice, and she changed like you said. You weren’t the only one suckered in, Sheriff. She also led me to the dock. There’s a group of dead bodies.”

He shuttered. “Not more dead people.”

“Yes, and many more will follow.” They stared at the dock and the corpse that spoke to them. He ushered the sheriff to the bodies, knowing who it was talking. “Hurry, it’s James! He can’t stay in the bodies long before they rot. He’s trying to help us.”

“What?” 

“I can’t explain, hurry up!”

They stepped up to the foot of the dock. The nearest corpse at their feet, Jackie Roberts, a forty-year old elementary school teacher, was riddled with puncture wounds throughout her body. She spoke through blue lips and steely eyes. “There are five walking corpses guarding the house, and soon, more enemies will arrive to stop you. They’ve played another movie, and it’s only a matter of time before their images are placed here. You’re in immediate danger, the both of you. And Andy’s still alive, Ned. He’s in the woods.”

Jackie’s face imploded as if squeezed by a giant hand and oil-colored fluid spattered the dock’s boards. Seconds later, Billie Kippers, an ex-marine, awoke. His throat was so badly serrated his vocal cords were visible as they throbbed. The face turned paler with every word he spoke. “Sheriff, you have to help Ned reach the house. Destroy the projector and the film reels. Burn the house down and render it to ashes. Move quickly before more of them come after you. The more reels they play, the worse it will be. They won’t stop at Anderson Mills. The images will continue to murder in other places. Everyone will become their victim.”

Billie’s body deflated in a boiling of liquefying skin and organs. He was rendered down to a skeleton and the pieces slipped through the cracks of the planks and sank into the water. Sarah Messersmith’s head cranked toward them with the clink of an exposed spine. The flesh slipped from her hands in a glove-shape as she beckoned the two from a lipless mouth. “Like the flying vampires in the sky, their flesh is weak and vulnerable. You finished off the man that could freeze things, Sheriff. His body shrank once he perished because they’re crudely recreated in flesh. They’re not complete by any means. During the autopsy, the butcher didn’t have organs or a full sized brain. He was created to serve a simple purpose—to bring suffering and death to this world. The worst is yet to come. The locusts will return. The undead world is hard at work now that they have an outlet to our side. The vampires are waiting in the woods for you to cross. Move with caution.”

Sarah’s body boiled and popped like hot grease and the entire corpse dripped between the wooden cracks in a caramel consistency. 

The sheriff turned from the dock and rushed up to the road. 

“Where are you going?”

“Follow me.”

Ned tracked the sheriff up to the main road. The police cruiser’s lights painted the woods in disorienting fashion. The sheriff opened the passenger side and reached in. “Take these.”

He accepted a Remington .22 rifle and a Colt Python pistol. “Jeez, you clear out the arsenal?”

“After what I found at the station, and my wife dead, I vowed to end this mess right now. I’m not going anywhere, Ned. We’re in this together. Are you up for it? I’ll deputize you.”

“As long as you’re supporting me, you can make me whatever the hell you like.”

“I suppose we’ll drive to the house. It’ll be faster and maybe we’ll avoid those flying whores.”

Ned heard the sound of many footsteps and a subtle chant of voices in the near distance. He raised his hand up to silence the sheriff. Together, they grew weary of what could be on the way. Ned recalled the group of older folks rising down the hill and emptying the houses of the bodies and delivering new damage to the corpses. They were born from another one of Andy’s movies. 

The sheriff gathered a pump action shotgun in one hand and armed his empty holster with a Ruger from inside the glove compartment. “This is in case of an emergency. It’ll blow the head off of anything in one shot.”

“You’ll need about five dozen shots,” Ned warned. “I’m not sure confrontation is the best way to go about this.”

It was too late. The shape of the horde was spit out of the darkness. The sheriff smirked, as if underwhelmed. “They’re old people dressed for bed.”

The blade of an axe spun between them and stuck business end into the windshield. A patter of gunshots rang out next. The cruiser’s wheels deflated, each shot up. Both side mirrors exploded. The hood was rendered into bits, coolant and oil leaking underneath the car. Every window was shattered one-by-one, each gunner a sharp shooter.

“Run!” Ned shouted with all his lung capacity. “We have to retreat into the woods. We’ll cut through and find the house. It’s the only way.”

The next shower of gunshots drove them to flee for safety. They cut through a cluster of oak trees first. Ned was already out of breath, but the outline of burning torches and random gunfire encouraged him onward. 

“The dirt path is to the right,” Ned shouted to his counterpart. “Follow it uphill to the house. It’s only a mile. I’ll meet you there.”

The sheriff didn’t answer, so he kept running.