B-Movie Reels (13 page)

Jill lined up the can, pulled the trigger, but the bullet went wide.
 

It smacked the water.
 

“Hah, hah, hah! Another beer for you.” Kevin reached into the cooler and tossed her another can of Coors. “Drink up, lady. I’ll have you in bed in no time.”

“Screw off. I’ll be too drunk to fuck, and then we’ll see who’s sorry.”

He hooked an earthworm and cast off. He looked up and saw some men filter out from the woods. They shambled about with a limping gait, their shoulders hunched crooked. Jill met his glance and noticed them as well. She counted six. They were dressed in soiled black suits. She couldn’t see their faces because the sun white-washed them out.
 

“Who the hell are they?”

Kevin scrutinized them harder. “Maybe they’re hurt.”

He walked toward them.
 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to bother them,” she warned. They were odd-looking. She made out one of their faces, and it was blackened over as if draped in dead skin. Jill couldn’t believe her eyes. The woods’ shadows were playing tricks, she argued with herself. “Don’t be a Good Samaritan. They’re getting around fine, why bother them?”

She wrapped her arms around him to anchor him still. He resisted and shrugged off her attempts, determined to know who the people were. “No, I have to check it out. There’s something suspicious about them. Their faces are strange, like they’re wearing masks. They’re up to something.”

Jill scanned up and down the lake and didn’t see anyone else. She’d feel better if the place was busier, but they were alone. It was at the time of the day where everyone returned to their camp sites and ate dinner. The six continued down the road, plodding to an unknown destination. Kevin jogged to catch up with them. When he was drunk, he lost the sense to mind his own business.
 

He called out to them, “Are you guys lost? Hey you! Hey you!”

Jill pursued Kevin, though she stayed a distance from him, scared. Wherever the men were going, they obviously didn’t want anything to do with him. They didn’t call out for help or break pace to look their way either. “I don’t like this. Turn back, Kevin—for me, okay? Please. I want to go home now. Kevin, I want to go home.”

“I don’t like the looks of them,” Kevin argued. “Why are six people wandering the woods in nice suits?”

“Quit being nosey, who cares? Hey, we can go back to my place. I’ll do a strip tease. This time, I’ll let you fuck me in any position you want. I have that maid’s outfit. What about the cheerleader one? I can be a schoolgirl. What’s the subject for class today?
Come on, Kevin!
Please stop this. For me. Please. This is really scaring me.”

Kevin’s interest didn’t wane. They were yards from the group now and making progress. As they got closer, they could see their suits were faded and covered in dried mud. Their hair was scraggly, but the skin was what concerned her—it looked dead and was peeling. She gasped at the sight of a bare skull through a serrated scalp. The worms dangling from teeth and stewing in eye sockets inspired nausea.

“What the hell is wrong with them?”

Kevin’s face hardened. “Hey, what the hell is wrong with you people? Stop for a second, would you? I want to talk to you!”

The group continued to limp to an unknown destination, though up ahead, the road ended in about half a mile and then changed into more woods. It eventually led to the Jennings’ dairy farm, but that wasn’t until five to ten miles north and most of it was an uphill hike.
 

“Let’s go back, okay?” Jill tugged on his shirt. “Please. It’s not worth it. They’re not bothering us. They’re not bothering anybody.”

“Be quiet!” This time he pushed her off of him hard. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

He cleared the distance between him and the group, determined to get his answers. Jill was about to cuss him out for the way he was treating her, but she let out a scream when the last one in the group suddenly lunged for him. The decayed, sunken face attached to his neck, clamping its teeth upon his trachea with the give of bone and tissue. Kevin’s eyes bulged from their sockets as blood billowed out both sides of his lips. “
Graaaaaah
!”

The dead man kept chewing through his throat, mincing, gnawing, gnashing, tearing, and turning over the meat in its mouth. Kevin thrashed in place, falling to the ground when he couldn’t breathe, choking on so much blood. The five others surrounded him and tore at his clothes, each of them digging through his abdomen and wrenching their fingers deeper to remove the skin and his insides. She turned to avoid the rough dissection, unable to process such an attack. Kevin’s blood-laden gargles ended shortly after his torso was exposed and open to the air. She snapped out of it, fleeing from them, thinking about the rifle, hoping to escape and live. She could scare them off and call for help.
 

The staggering notion repeated in her head as a distress signal.
Kevin is dead, Kevin is dead, Kevin is dead…
 

She raced to the fishing dock, out of breath and sick to her stomach. Tears clouded her vision, blurring her surroundings. She desperately traced the water’s edge for the rifle. It was where she left it, propped against the dock’s post. Running to it, she cradled the stock and sprinted back to where she left Kevin. She kept racing on until she trounced through the puddles of blood. From the puddles, red footprints led into the woods. A distant outline of the figures became smaller as they disappeared behind the dense trees, disturbing the branches in their way. One of them had hoisted Kevin’s body over its shoulder. She couldn’t bring herself to pursue them, filled with stone cold terror. It wasn’t until a car drove by and picked her up that she was able to alert the police about what had happened to Kevin.
 

The two law officials stared down into the hole at Anderson Mills Cemetery and Cal Unger’s mud-caked corpse strewn at the bottom. Their flashlights combed the scene. It was early evening and the sun was on its way to clocking off for the night.

“What the hell is going on in our town?” Deputy Stafford complained to the sheriff. “We keep finding mutilated bodies. This is the worst thing to happen since, well, since ever. Pretty soon nobody will want to live here, including me. Forget vacations and forget the summer tourists. Nobody will want to stay here.”

The sheriff turned to him, a snarl drawn into his face. “We managed to clear the bodies from the slaughterhouse and Wayne’s deli without anyone noticing. Reporters won’t show up unless someone leaks the information. Vincent Freeman is the only one who knows about Cal Unger. He promised to keep quiet. The funeral director doesn’t want bad press at his cemetery. And Cal doesn’t have any family locally. I’ll have to check for next of kin later on.”

The deputy’s eyes were glued to the human remains half-sunken in the mud. Cal’s head was featureless, the face eaten off, and his emptied torso and arms and legs were picked clean of flesh. “Who do you think did this? I mean, it was an animal, right? Or something like an animal.”

“It has to be the man I shot at Doug’s shop,” the sheriff guessed. He breathed hard and shuddered, contemplating the possibilities. “These are the first incidents of cannibalism I’ve encountered. And I mean
ever
.”

The deputy pointed at a nearby grave—tufts of dirt and grass had been clawed aside in piles. Beneath the grass, a gaping hole channeled deep, as if a giant gopher had made its exit. “Hey, you see that? It looks like somebody dug up the grave.”

“If they dug it up, there’d be more dirt. It almost looks like somebody dug themselves out from beneath the ground.”

“That’s not possible.”

The sheriff retrieved a cigarette from his front pocket. “Earlier, Kyle Redding and Frank Garrison said that butcher’s body, Jorg, didn’t have any brains or bones. It was all fat and cartilage. I know it’s bizarre, Mike, but what else do we got but our own two eyes in this case?”

The sheriff pointed at a grave ten stones to the right. “And here’s another grave with the same thing. It looks like the body dug themselves out. We should have someone dig up the coffins and find out for certain.”

The deputy scoffed at the idea. “We’re wasting enough valuable time already.”

“Then I’ll do it myself if I have to,” the sheriff argued. “I want an explanation. This is our job, Mike. We don’t shirk from the unbelievable, not after this afternoon—not when we’ve found Cal Unger’s body in pieces at the bottom of the grave he was digging up last night. His limbs were clean of meat.
He was eaten, for God’s sake!”

The deputy scratched his head. “Maybe I don’t want to believe this is happening, okay? I’m wondering if Mary-Sue Jennings’ dad is really missing. She said he didn’t return home last night.”

“I don’t know. We’ll need more back-up from Green County. And I want to know what Jorg’s autopsy turned up. The autopsy’s been hurried. In a few hours we should learn something.”

“So what now?”

The sheriff’s radio went off at his belt. “Sheriff O’Malley here.”

“We have an incident at Silver Lake at the fishing dock,” the dispatcher announced. “Please report.”

“I’ll be right there.” He turned to the deputy. “Wait here for the ambulance to show up. Garrison and Redding will be here any minute to comb the area. I’ll take care of this call.”

The sheriff pulled up to the docks. He recognized Jill Hammock sitting on a bench even though she was draped in shadow. She was wrapped in a towel and shivering under it. A man stood beside her, a local named Zack Crosen.
 

Zack intercepted him on the way to Jill. “She’s shaken up pretty good. Jill said her boyfriend was attacked by six men. That’s all she’ll tell me. She said she didn’t want to talk about it until someone like you showed up. I’ll tell you one thing, Sheriff, I was on my way back to where I was camping when I found Jill with a rifle in her hand. There were puddles of blood on the gravel. I think her boyfriend was murdered. From what I saw, it was…messy.”

“Okay, okay, go ahead and take off, but I’ll be calling you. It’s best I talk to Jill alone. Maybe she’ll open up to me.”

Zack drove off in his pick-up and left him alone with Jill. Her face was frozen, her eyes unblinking. The skin around her eyes and nose was pink, rubbed raw from a long cry. The Remington Buckshooter was propped beside her at the ready.

Leaning down, he said to her, “Hey there, are you okay?”

She was hoarse, yet spoke softly. “I think so.”

He couldn’t shake the way her eyes didn’t shift or blink. They were glued to nothing. “Listen, you’re okay now. It’s safe. No one can hurt you. Now tell me what happened, if you’re ready.”

“Kevin’s dead,” she confessed, busting into tears. She hid her face in her hands. “They came out of the woods and dragged him away. They…they…they—
They tore him to pieces!
”

The sheriff rubbed her back with his open palm to soothe her, then he rocked her back and forth in his arms. “Please calm down, Jill. It’s for Kevin’s benefit that you stay calm. Who came from the woods? Did you know them? What did they look like?”

“They were c-corpses. I mean, their faces looked rotten. They were dressed for the grave. There were six of them. They carried Kevin into the woods after killing him. One of them tore out his throat, and then…and then…then…”

“I understand.” He’d heard enough. “We should take you home. I’ll have someone call your brother, and he can stay with you. Please relax. We’ll find Kevin. I promise.”

Jill wept harder, not relieved. He guided her to the patrol car and helped her inside. He walked to where Zack picked Jill up to confirm what he’d said. And when he reached that point in the road, he discovered the blood Zack was talking about.

2

Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana
was released in European theatres in 1978, but it was met with little enthusiasm at the American theatres and went straight to the bargain venues. This movie is the sleaziest, goriest, plot-lacking piece of crap I’ve watched thus far. There is one rat in the movie, and don’t ask me why there aren’t more since the contaminated water sewage treatment was infested with the vermin. The real answer is probably budgetary concerns. The local biology professor, Dr. Doug McBradey, faces the terror with a girl, Penny Anderson, who is in the seventh grade. Her father is mauled by the humongous rat the size of a grizzly bear. The girl doesn’t have a mother, and why she’s allowed to roam the area with a professor alone is strange. The rat is lured into a sewer where Dr. McBradey and Penny Anderson baited the rodent with corpses taken from the local morgue—and how they’d be able to use those bodies without special permission is beyond me—and trick the creature into the goofiest trap of all time: a life-sized mouse-trap! The mouse takes the corpse-bait, it snaps, and the trap is rigged with C-4. My favorite quote from Dr. McBradey: “Every biologist always keeps a brick or two of C-4 handy. When you become a biologist, you too, Penny, will one day live to set your own explosions.” The film ends with the rat’s debris settling, and the two crawling out of the sewer to a sunny day. The end. I want my money back.

Andy filled a plastic cup of ice with McCormick’s whiskey and Coke and chugged it down. It was darkening outside, and when he peered out the back window, he wondered what Mary-Sue was doing. He was disappointed he didn’t get better acquainted with her, and there was a chance he wasn’t ever going to talk to her again judging by the way she reacted last night.