Afraid of what could be behind the exit door, Penny was forced to think fast. She hid behind a pile of old theatre seats. Who was coming into the building? Penny waited for the exit door to open. The door did open, and one-by-one, they shambled in. The rush of cold night air was ripened by a punch of dead flesh and expired organs on the same level as what the reels of film were soaking in those damnable plastic bins. Dressed for the grave, their faces mummified and decayed beyond the point of having features except curvatures of bone and petrified flesh, the word repeated in Penny’s brain: zombie. In their arms were cardboard boxes. The half dozen zombies kept filing in and out of the back room piling up the boxes. This happened for ten long agonizing minutes. Penny could feel her body’s muscles lock up from being crouched low for so long. Her lungs could pop, the way she wanted to scream and call out for help.
After leaving the back room again, the zombies didn’t return. Penny stayed still for minutes. She decided to take the chance to see if the way was clear. As she got up, nobody was in sight. She couldn’t go the back way again. She might run into the dead people, or whatever the hell they were. Moving forward, going deeper into the theatre, her eyes fell on the guts and blood in the rubber tubs. They could be slaughterhouse organs, she thought, but even if that were the case, the situation was still deranged. So wrong.
Forgoing anymore guesses or hypothesis about the unexplainable, Penny treaded down to the end of the backroom toward the hallway that lead to the main drag of theatres. Up from that stretch would be Jules’s office. Possible safety. She would call the police and put this harrowing scene behind her.
Before she made it very far, the door from both the back exit and the main door leading into the theatre area opened. Penny hid behind a huge cardboard display for the movie Casablanca. More of the dead people shambled in through the back exit. They were clutching onto plastic tubs and setting them separate from the boxes they had just brought in earlier. From the other door, a group of three women entered. They were naked from head to toe, shapely and buxom, smooth-skinned and waxen in the overhead lights. The trio walked in confident and with mischievous grins. Their eyes were smoldering embers, though they changed hue, as if every breath they took stoked the fires in their sockets. Blood trailed from their lips. Penny could see sharp teeth poking out from their mouths.
The women sorted through the cardboard boxes. They removed reel canister after reel canister and stacked them up high. Without a word between the vampires and the zombies, they went to work on an unknown task. Ten dead people were working. Half of them started taking down the reels of film that hung from the ceiling and placed them on a table, while the other half were digging out the film strips that had been soaking in the offal and hanging them up to dry. The vampires were working with scissors to snip the new film reels brought in and then steeping them into the tubs of blood. Once the work was done, the zombies filed out of the building and the vampires swiftly exited the room.
Penny blew a sigh of relief. Many thoughts were cycling through her head, all of them ending in ghastly question marks. She was beginning to think running out the exit might not be such a bad idea. If she crossed those dead people’s paths, she could bolt for the main road and call for help.
After running through her options for safety, Penny decided to escape through the theatre building instead. Other people were out there. She could scream, and someone would help her, and maybe, just maybe, it would all be over.
“H-help me, p-please. Don’t leave me to d-die.”
The voice was coming from behind Penny. A woman’s. She wore a pink sweater and black jeans. Her long blonde hair was disheveled. A red handprint was slathered on her cheek. Along her middle, it looked like a sharp talon had slashed her. The wound was deep enough to bleed, but not deep enough that it couldn’t easily be fixed in an emergency room. The woman was crying.
“You see what they’re doing to those reels?” the girl said as Penny helped her up off the ground. “They’re steeping them in the blood of their victims as another way to bring the movies back to life. It’s the way they’re waging their war against us. They won’t lose this time. The dead will kill the living. Everyone. Will. Die.”
Her laugh was dark and bloodcurdling. Suddenly the woman acted as if she didn’t feel any pain. Only joy. “There will be no one left on earth. They will have their way this time because there’s no one to stop them. The evil is much too strong. THEY WILL NOT FAIL! THEY WILL TAKE US TO HELL! THE DEAD SHALL HAVE THEIR WAY WITH THE LIVING!”
“Shut your mouth. They’ll hear us!” Penny shook the woman and was a second away from slapping her when the door leading into the theatre shot open. The three naked women stormed in, but this time, wings sprouted from their backs made of black leather. Reptilian skin was born, the soft supple flesh morphing into rough scales. The woman who was screaming suddenly turned into one of the vampires.
Penny was squeezed by the neck. It felt like the slightest shift of the woman’s hand could break Penny’s neck. The vampires surrounded her. No escape.
“Decoys work every time,” one of the vampire women spoke in a demon’s rasp. “What shall we do with you? Drink from your arteries? Lick you where it tastes good? Pike you from the anus to the mouth? No, no, no, that’d be a precious waste of blood. The blood of the living on my lips gives me shudders. It brings me such climaxes. I get too excited just thinking about the many ways to kill you.”
Penny squirmed on the inside as a forked tongue ran up her neck and tickled her ear lobe. The vampire-reptile woman whispered to her, “I’d cut you wide open and make love to you, but the cemetery tramps have other things to keep them busy at the moment. The final showing is underway. The Final Flesh. And as it turns out, there are two seats left. We can’t have empty seats for the big show. It looks like you lucked out.”
Sniffing like a wild boar, the vampire smelled Penny’s hair and skin. “Looks like your boyfriend hasn’t touched you in a long time. I say after a woman hasn’t had sex in a long time, it’s like they become a virgin again. I’ll return for you, my sweet smelling flower, after the show. Your blood shall run down my lips.” In a sharp declaration, “Take her to the theatre.”
As Penny passed the tables stocked with bloody reels, she noticed the snippets covered in blood and hunks of flesh began to fuse together. The slightest sounds of screams, though projected at a whisper’s strength, emanated from the tangles of reels that began to connect and become one big reel. Then Penny was out of the room, shoved onward. What she witnessed on the way to Theatre 4 chilled her to her very marrow and threatened to shatter her sanity.