Jules decided to leave Max Alabaster in his apartment if the young man wouldn’t help him. Time was burning. People were dying. Jules picked up the Rubbermaid case of reels. It was heavy, but he managed to heft it. The moment Jules lifted them up, things started smashing through the floorboards. Clawed reptilian hands reached up to grip their ankles.
“Shit!” Max blasted his rifle, missing the dinosaur hands reaching for their ankles. “Where did they come from?”
“You want an honest answer? You’re not getting one. We’re outta here. Cover me. We’re making a dash for the elevator.”
“They know we’re here. They’ll be out there waiting for us, and, and I’m out of ammo.”
The container was already getting heavy in his hands. Jules had to think fast. What could they do to extend their life spans long enough to reach the elevator?
Jules spat out an idea as he caught the green raptor’s face poke out from the hole in the floor. He kicked it in the face and raced out of the bedroom back into the living room. Along each of the walls, the wallpaper was moving. Slithering.
“Worms!” Max cried. “Worms everywhere!”
The walls were moving spaghetti, worms eating through the wood to get to them. The floorboards kept splitting and breaking as more creepy crawlies closed in.
“Think like a horror movie, Max. You make them, right? For God’s sake, think! How do we save ourselves?”
The independent filmmaker thought fast. He reached for the two liquor bottles on the coffee table, smashed them and used a cigarette lighter to set flame to the puddles. Fires spread, burning the carpet. Arcs of orange danced about the living room. The walls continued to slither with slimy worms, but the dinosaurs backed off long enough for them to form a plan.
Max opened a closet nearby and howled in terror as one after the other, severed heads kept falling free like bowling balls from the top shelf. Heads eventually filled the living room. Max tripped and kicked through them, clutching a broom in each hand.
“I know that’s happened before in some horror movie!” Max cursed the heads, horrified and pissed off at the same time. “Listen up. I’m setting fire to these brooms.” He dipped the straw fiber heads into the burning carpet. They caught aflame immediately. “Most monsters or bad guys die in movies by being set on fire, or from being blown up, and since we don’t have any explosives, fire it is. I’ve got your back. Hurry before the worms get us.”
Jules set the reels down, removed the barricade, picked up the reels and kicked open the door with his hands full. The second the rickety door shot off the hinges, a shower of maggots sprayed them both from all ends of the room.
BROOOOOOOOOOOOOONG!
He was confused by the synthesizer note of discord. Max was waving the burning brooms in front of Jules, warding off the maggots that faltered as the flames ate into their tiny white bodies.
“The elevator’s just down the hall,” Max shouted. “Go!”
Jules knew they were in for an attack no matter what they did. The building reacted to their progress. Worms chewed threw wood at every wall, even the ceilings, spitting sod and splinters. Every door in every room that wasn’t closed suddenly shot open. People melting with wicks sticking out of their skulls with flesh waxberries dripping down their faces reached out to strangle them. The two of them ran past the small group of melting people only to duck and dodge three spinning cleavers.
“My cuts are the finest!”
From within another room, a pig faced butcher stood beside a meat grinder as pink straws of human meat spilled out the spout. He was feeding dead body after dead body into the device.
“Jorg!” Max screeched, recognizing the movie villain. “You can’t eat me! Fuck you!”
Another huge rhinoceros beetle approached, and Jules rammed it in its thorax with the Rubbermaid container and sent it reeling backward on its legs. Max touched the burning broom to it and set it aflame. Stuffed teddy bears and chubby faced plastic baby dolls each held little knives in their hands. They were incoming.
Picking up their pace, new enemies materialized. A woman in a maternity gown screamed as a horned demon baby tore its way from her stomach to attack. Max threw the broom like a spear, the broom stick going through the red demon’s belly and pinning it to the wall.
Two children were playing hopscotch, singing, “Death is forever, death is forever, give us your body forever…”
They were only feet away from the elevator. All they had to do was sprint.
And dodge the screaming raptor who guarded it.
Max reacted first to the threat of the raptor. He threw aside his burning broom, plunged his hands into the wormy walls, and threw a handful of the worms into the raptor’s face. Blinding the creature, they ran around the dinosaur. When the elevator opened on its own and they fell in, they finally processed the damage they had taken. They weren’t unscathed. Jules’s belly gleamed with red slashes. He dropped the bin of reels to hold in his guts. Max was choking in wet bubbly gasps. His throat was torn out. The guy was already dead. His eyes were vacant as his shredded throat continued to bleed out.
The elevator door closed in time to avoid the raptor’s next move.
Bleeding, in agony but forcing himself to get the reels to where they needed to be, Jules eyed the console. This wasn’t a normal console. He was in a movie and anticipated the glowing red buttons. He had to press the right button. The right floor. This was the elevator from the movie Elevator to Hell. He showed this film at The Odyssey Theatre forever ago. He remembered the characters getting on had to pick the right button or else suffer what a different enemy on each floor had in store for them.
One button was the way to safety.
The others, not so much.
Bleeding out from the gashes large enough he caught the gleam of his intestines, Jules did his best not to black out. If he blacked out, he would black out forever.
The elevator hummed, the buttons lighting up then darkening, lighting up then darkening. He had to pick a floor. There were twenty buttons.
Think like the movie.
He struggled to remember Elevator to Hell and how the protagonist survived. The whole movie took place in an elevator, though there were breaks in between as they walked onto a new floor where various horrors awaited them. The point of the movie was to find the first floor where they could make their exit to safety.
He would bleed out before that happened.
Coughing up blood, falling to his knees, Jules pushed his palm against one of the elevator buttons. The direction of the elevator went up. Soon, the elevator opened, showing a science laboratory. People were kept in giant glass jars. The people banged on the walls, demanding Jules to help them escape. An old scientist who looked like a Nazi was accompanied by a hunchback ghoul and a woman with robotic legs. The scientist pressed a button, and the glass traps turned into blenders, reducing the people into pureed matter.
Jules hit another button, horrified at what he saw.
Wrong floor.
He hit another button.
Max was dead on the ground, a puddle of blood spreading across the floor and leaking out the edges of the elevator.
Seeing the blood, something occurred to him.
One hand over his guts, he used the other to pry open the rubber tote. Digging out the reels, he read the titles. Lots of sleaze and porn, and then he caught sight of a movie he recognized.
Bitch Fist.
He opened the reel case, dug out the reel, spread out the film strip and dipped it in the blood.
I have nothing to lose.
The elevator shot open without him expecting it. An axe barely missed his legs. “SPLIT YOU IN TWO!”
He shut the elevator before the lumberjack enemy could swing again.
Opening up yet another reel and dipping it in the blood, he knew this wasn’t a horror movie.
Diving Dynamo.
Forcing open another film called Action Reaction, spreading the strips of film over the blood, he was suddenly seeing double. Every process in his body was weakening. Turning numb. He struggled to grip another reel as the tips of his fingers had zero feeling, except bone chilling cold.
He was closing in on death.
The elevator opened again. A group of children in Catholic school uniforms were playing dolls with dead human beings. Giggling, the group of boys and girls kept switching limbs with who Jules assumed were supposed to be their dead parents. Arms, legs, hair pieces and busts were mismatched among male and female owners. The parents’ faces were over-made up, pale white with pink circles at the cheeks.
The sickening sight of children playing with body parts sent him over the edge. Jules peeled open another reel case and dropped a reel marked Grenade and another called M.U.T.T.S. before he couldn’t do anything more. Before Jules closed his eyes, Max had come back to life. Max’s bodily movements were stiff with rigor mortis. Talking through a severed neck, his words were bubbles, “You have to put your guts on them, Mr. Baxter.”
The corpse’s hand reached through the serrated folds of Jules’s belly and yanked out his intestines coil-by-coil until they splattered the top of the strips of film. The life went out of Jules as each yard of viscera exited his body. He fell over the top of the tote of reels, knocking them all on top of the pile of blood and gore, mixing titles like The Justifier, Peacemaker, Julie Justice, B.L.A.S.T. and Edge of the Blade.
Jules was dead.
Right before he died, he reached up and hit one more elevator button.