B-Movie Attack (23 page)

“You got it. Let’s send these sluts to the cutting room floor for the last time.”

Vickers charged ahead of him.
 

Ted halted.
 

Shooting from the entrance of the apartment building, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five schoolgirls formed a wall outside the apartment. Vickers stopped, utterly dumbfounded. “Ted, is this from another one of your goddamn movies?”

The breath was sucked from his lungs. Ted couldn’t move. The sight captivated him. He finally whispered, “
Slasher Girls
.”

“Slasher what?”

“They’re from a movie called
Slasher Girls
. I wrote it when I lived in an apartment above a strip club and dated an ex-women’s rights activist. It’s a looong story.”

Vickers didn’t have time to respond. A hatchet was flung from fifteen yards out. It struck him dead-center in the skull. Another axe spun from handle to blade, handle to blade, with an alarming and final whoosh, and Vickers’ head was shucked from the neck. The cluster of schoolgirls raised scythes and swords and chopped him into so many pieces before the corpse could even drop. Then they carried his pieces into the apartment building. A few stayed as sentries at the entrance, unmoving.
 

Ted was alone in this fight. A vampire’s bitter laughter echoed from his apartment. They had won again, he realized. He didn’t stand a chance against them. All he could do was buy enough time to run. He chucked the flaming bottle into the air. It crashed down on the skirted sentries, the alcohol fire blanketing them in flames. They screamed and burned. The horde charged him, braving the flames, as new women stormed out of the building after him. Ted sprinted, mustering the courage and ability to outrun them for two blocks. The burnt shells of cars and random corpses were spread out on the streets. Ted darted around each obstacle. The laughter and chatter of schoolgirls were far behind him. They were busied by the male corpses in the street. They chopped them up like they did Vickers, and danced, and cheered, and raised the butchered remains in the air until they found yet more male bodies to defile.
 

A corner bar named Side Pockets appeared ahead of him, so Ted dived for cover inside. A quick search revealed there was only a back and front entrance to guard. Ted rushed to create a chair barricade at the front and locked the back steel door. It wasn’t until he downed three shots of rye whiskey at the bar that the truth sank in.
 

He’d failed to save the city.
 

Billy wasn’t quick to locate the voice talking to him. He edged down the hallway, wildly scanning in front and behind him. He feared someone like the Intestinator would pounce on him. He stopped at Jim Lyndsey’s office. This time he heard the words, “
In here, Billy. I’m not one of them. I’m Andy Ryerson
.”

Andy Ryerson.

Am I supposed to recognize that name?

Billy braced himself for anything. He glanced back at Jessica’s office. Nobody else was roused by the voice except for him. He snuck into the office and unleashed a small yelp. A man was face-down on his desk. Blood soaked the carpet beneath the desk; the man had slit his wrists. Billy couldn’t locate the weapon. The method of death became irrelevant when the corpse lifted his head from the desk. He was blue faced and quite dead.
 

The corpse's movements were slow, as if his limbs were made of concrete. He reached out and begged, “Don’t run from me! I’m not going to hurt you.”

Billy backed out of the office and slammed the door. “It’s another monster. Damn it, I’m so stupid!”

The voice continued to beckon him, and then it deteriorated. He heard the sound of splattering. The collapse of bones.
 

He was confused, standing there. If it was a monster, why didn’t it come after him? The man was a zombie, it seemed, but how did it know his name? Why did it plead with him?

Curiosity wouldn’t allow him to leave the hall. If the zombie was alive, he’d come out at any moment and attack. Billy couldn’t ignore that fact, and he wouldn’t put anybody else on night watch without taking care of the intruder first.
 

Billy opened the door again, ready to close it immediately if he was assaulted. The zombie was gone, to his astonishment. A liquid pile of skin, tissue, blood and disintegrating bone faced him. The sludge didn’t move. The zombie was dead. Again.

A hand closed over his mouth. His feet were swept from beneath him. Two different pairs of hands clutched onto him, one carrying him by his upper body, the other holding his legs. He thrashed and attempted to call for help, but the hand stayed in place even after he bit it three times—and tasted pieces of dead skin sloughing off into his mouth.

“If you want Jessica and your best friend to be safe, you’ll stay quiet. We’re not here to hurt you. We want to help you. Let us help you. But we have to take you to a special room first.”

Yeah sure, a special killing room. Away from help, right? Why should I trust walking dead men?

He was carried through two hallways and three doors, the final door leading to a stairwell. Taking a side door, they entered Allied Health Insurance Company. Cubicles and corpses filled what used to be a workplace. The zombies at both sides of him began to drip onto the ground, and they released him. The skin was loosening from their hands like hot putty. Accompanied by the slither of flesh, the sharp crack and give of bones, his capturers dismantled before his eyes. The swirl of greens, reds and blacks dripped onto the tiles.
 

“Nasty.” He dodged the incoming fleshy puddles. “That’s what you get for trying to capture me. I'm getting the fuck out of here.”

“No, wait!” a constricted voice shouted behind him. “Billy, please, listen to us. We’re only trying to help you. Listen to me. It’s your only chance to save Chicago.”

Billy was frozen in place. The words were coming from a cubicle down the way. He ran to it. A woman met him wearing a blue top and gray skirt. Her neck was snapped, tilted flimsily to one side. Her face was even bluer than the last corpse. Very much dead. “I’m a ghost, Billy. My name is Andy Ryerson. I'm talking through this body to reach you. An attack happened one year ago in the town of Anderson Mills, Kansas. Monsters from movies came to life. You have to destroy the projector. It’s the only way to stop them.”

The corpse’s eyes rolled into the back of its head and then exploded as if a firecracker went off under each eyelid. The rest of the woman's flesh melted in waxy thick trails until the skeleton was bare. The body kept talking until the final moment when the head snapped off. The last words it spoke were: “My spirit entering these bodies causes the corpses to melt and break. I only have so many chances to talk to you. Please, just listen to me. I won’t harm you. I know you’re scared. So was I when it happened to me.”

The woman crashed front first onto the carpet. A suited corpse, this one with yellow-blue-purple bruises around his throat, limped up to him. The man’s mouth dribbled black blood between words. “My uncle was named James Ryerson. He was a magician. He moved into a house that was haunted by a ghost who happened to be a preacher. This preacher was an oracle. He spoke to the dead before and after he died. His name was Edgar Hutchinson. Edgar made contact with my uncle while he lived in that house. The dead man haunted my uncle for favors. In fact, Edgar wouldn’t leave him alone ever. Other ghosts joined in too with favors to ask of my uncle. They kept him up at all hours of the night. He couldn’t escape them. The ghosts wanted him to terrorize the living from beyond. They were driving him crazy, but the ghosts offered him something he couldn’t refuse. Fame and fortune. To improve his magic act, the ghosts inhabited his magic items, and James’ shows became world famous. But the ghosts inhabited other items in his house, including an Orion projector…”

The cuffs of the man’s suit began to stream out steaming globules of caramel-consistency flesh. Another corpse, an older woman, an assistant with a headset on, ambled up to him next from a nearby cubicle. Her neck had been snapped as well.
 

She said, “James burned the magic items after a vicious attack killed fifty people during one of his acts. But the ghosts remained in the Orion projector. After my uncle vanished without a trace, I inherited his house. I just graduated film school, and my professor asked me to watch a collection of rediscovered horror movies. I ended up using the projector in the attic, the haunted projector, and the monsters in the films were projected in real life. The ghosts used them as a vessel to live again. I destroyed the projector but one of the films survived. They possessed that instead, and when the film was shown they came to life and found another projector to inhabit. Their only goal is to cause chaos and death. They’re bitter, vengeful spirits who hate the living for being alive. They’re using old horror movie reels to enact their revenge.

“If they can’t be human, then nobody can. They want us to be wandering spirits in limbo like them, permanent residents in hell. They won’t stop until everybody in the city is dead. Then they’ll plunder the next big metropolis and then small towns until earth is one big graveyard. The thing I’ve learned since death is that the ghosts are further tainted by the horror movie character they become. They take on the movie villain’s persona and their aspirations. They truly become the movies. A movie character by the name of
Jorg: The Hungry Butcher
rampaged through Anderson Mills, chopping people into choice cuts when I was still alive. Even though a ghost was trapped inside the reel’s image of Jorg, the ghost was using Jorg’s movie lines, acting out Jorg’s actions from the movie all the same. More films are being shown this time around, and now the ghost’s identities are even more lost in the characters. But if you destroy the projector and all the films, you end their outlet into the world. You can stop this, Billy. They’re playing possessed reels in an apartment building. I’ve written down the address on this piece of paper. You must do what I say, or else city after city will suffer the same horrifying deaths. It will never end. It will only grow worse.

“Not all spirits are evil, Billy. Many good people await their loved ones in the afterlife when their time finally comes. I created an insurance policy in case you don’t trust me. He’ll be waiting for you in the hallway when you return to the fourth floor. He’s watching over your friends. End this, Billy, before it’s too late. I'm begging you to take what I say to heart. You don’t have much time. The air is growing thin. Save yourselves and everybody else.”

The woman disintegrated. Billy turned his head in disgust as her remains splashed onto the carpet. He waited for another corpse to rise and speak again. After three minutes, he quit waiting. Billy was about to leave for the fourth floor when he recalled the address the old woman’s corpse told him about.
 

He stepped over the woman’s liquefied remains and into the cubicle. On a piece of paper, an address was scrawled in blue ink. He picked it up and turned over in his mind what had happened in the past five minutes.
 

I should’ve asked more questions. Who the hell is Andy Ryerson? Movies coming to life can’t be for real. But it makes sense. I was right from the beginning.
 

“Yeah, and Jessica and Nelson are going to believe me. Sure. Fuck it, I don't care. We’ll drive across town to this guy Ted Fuller’s apartment and destroy the projector. It's the best I've got.”

The words repeated in his head:
I created an insurance policy in case you don’t trust me.
 

He rushed through the cubicles, out of the insurance company's offices, climbed down a flight of stairs and returned to Jessica’s office. He struggled for breath. The air was getting thinner, and he was coughing in fits.
 

I’m too fucking fat to save the world!

Billy slowed when he heard laughter. Yards from Jessica’s office, the door wide open, he overheard Nelson talking boisterously. Jessica was standing up and was immediately drawn to him when he arrived. “I don’t know who the hell this guy is, but Nelson seems to know him.”

“I’m Dr. Aorta,” the stranger in the room announced, greeting Billy. “Now you know me, and we can get to work. I’m not getting much of a hero’s welcome, but real heroes don't need them, now do they?”

Dr. Aorta was six feet tall, athletic and muscular. His head was shaved and formed a point at the top. He wore a brown leisure suit and sucked on the end of an unlit cigar. The man kept a monocle in his right eye with a sterling silver chain hanging from the side. A pin of the Russian flag was stuck to his left breast pocket. The man had a slight Russian accent, though it was tempered with a New Jersey accent on and off. Billy couldn’t wrap his mind around why this man was here until he finally understood.
 

This was yet another creation based on a B-movie.
 

Billy asked, “Where did you come from?”
 

“Andy Ryerson sent me. You just talked to him, didn’t you?”

Billy was awestruck. Jessica tugged on his arm. “You were gone. I woke up to a knock on the door, and there he was. I didn’t know what to do. Thank God Nelson recognized him. I about shit my pants.”

“You guys haven’t seen many old horror movies, have you?” Nelson patted Dr. Aorta’s shoulder as if they'd won a rugby game, and Dr. Aorta had scored the winning point. “Haven’t you seen
Frankenstein Lives at Your Dormitory
?
Swamp Creatures Attack San Diego
? How about
Chronicle of the Grim Reaper
? You almost died in that one. The grim reaper about cut you down. And what about
Undead Cheerleader Squad
?
Beneath the Quicksand
?
Reef Monsters of Coral Island
?
Beach Volleyball Communists
?
Come on, you haven’t seen any of his films? He’s a Russian biochemist and mercenary hired by the Soviets to infiltrate vampires, zombies and, well, undead cheerleaders. Their pom-poms, you see, were created with cheap plastic. It caused a radioactive reaction through the plastic, which channeled through their wrists, into their bloodstreams and into their brains.