B-Movie Reels (14 page)

Giving up on thoughts of women and unrequited love, he completed some film research on his laptop. The reels hadn’t been officially released on DVD, although many fans had copied them from VHS to DVD and were selling them on auction sites for incredibly high prices. He recalled
Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana
was going for eight or nine bucks, but an official release would be on sale in six months time for twenty bucks from Schlock-Shock-Cinema, re-mastered, uncut and in anamorphic widescreen.

Assholes
, he thought.
Those aficionados need to learn how to hold out longer for a movie.

He poured more alcohol into his drink than he realized, and Andy almost tripped into the living room over the projector cord. “Not again. I was lucky enough to find the projector upstairs to replace the university’s.”
 

He checked his equipment, and much to his relief, it still worked.

Moving on, he walked up the stairs and washed his face to sober up. The cold water re-invigorated him. The creak underfoot and the shift of the foundation reminded him he was alone. He wished Ned was here to explain more about Uncle James. Why did he return to the magic business after so long? A friend of Andy’s from college, Chad Jenkins, was an Internet junkie and an amateur hacker. His father was involved with the local police in Lawrence, Kansas, and Chad gained access to digitally captured photos of the bodies taken at the scene. It was horrible to look at, he recalled, but he insisted on viewing anything he could dig up on his uncle and the murders. One was a body where a man’s head was melted into a woman’s shoulder socket, the rest of the limbs intact. The image of a college-aged girl having a man’s head on her shoulder couldn’t be erased from his memory, though he wanted it gone forever. The man’s head itself was emptied of its eyes, and his mouth was sealed closed with skin. Another body, he recalled, was sitting on a bar stool with an arm connected to a neck’s stump with strands of muscle tissue fusing it together. It was an insane artist’s concept of the human anatomy.
 

Ever since he stepped into the house, he couldn’t stop thinking how Uncles James was innocent. His living uncle was right to be so stressed out. Every corner of Anderson Mills was a reminder about Uncle James and the killings. The man lost his wife and his peace of mind over the ordeal.
 

“You didn’t commit those killings, Uncle James,” he whispered to himself. “You’re innocent, I know it. No man could do such a thing.”

The lights suddenly dimmed. The yellow lights changed to a dull red. The foundation groaned as if the floorboards were constricted in all directions.
 

Andy froze and listened. He waited a minute, and when the lights came back on full strength, he dared to move again. “This house is fucked—and old too. What an old fucking house.”

He checked his equipment to make sure it wasn’t damaged by the fluctuation of electricity, and the projector was fine. The hardest decision was what movie to watch next? He removed every reel and fished through them to the bottom and discovered
Night of the Locusts
.
 

“Sounds interesting. I wonder if it’s just like
Humanoid Rat Eats
Indiana
. Toxic something or other will spill somehow and then locusts will be contaminated, and then what? Will they eat people and ravage the countryside? How would you stop locusts? It’s not like the movie will just have one enemy to blow up and the dilemma will be over. Logically—not that any of these filmmakers think that way—there will be thousands and thousands of them. It sounds biblical. Will God come down and smite the locusts, and then the world will live happily ever after and ride a horse into the sunset with a big-breasted woman?”

Just like Mary-Sue.

He still wasn’t sure what to think about her. Walter Smalls assured him she was trouble, as was her father. What Walter really meant by that, he wasn’t sure. Andy figured he’d visit Walter again. The coot was the only friend he had in town now that Mary-Sue took offense at last night’s failed romantic evening. The smallest urge reminded him he’d turned down sex, and the last time he’d slept with Sandy Brown was over three months ago—eons for a male in his late twenties.
 

“Forget about it,” he laughed at himself. “You can have a date with your hand in the Jacuzzi later. No one’s around to watch. No hearts get broken.”

He eyed his laptop computer. He’d gear up porn from the Internet, perhaps a video to download, and enjoy a drawn-out episode of female masturbation. Andy imagined the laptop at the edge of the Jacuzzi falling in and zapping him to death. He then pictured an investigative crew surrounding his fried, naked body. “It seems Andy Ryerson electrocuted himself while playing jollies with his johnson,” the lead investigator would say. “Everyone knew the boy was trouble, Detective. Only a Ryerson could do this, sir. Playing jollies with his johnson, Jesus Christ. And he didn’t even get to finish.
He didn’t even get to
finish.
”

Andy eyed the whiskey and poured himself another drink. “The hell with it, here’s to you, Uncle James.”

Night of the Locusts
is a fascinating flick, definitely five stars on the comedic charts of the unintentional comedy hour. Buckley, Missouri. A group of hick moonshine makers are running stills in bathtubs. Johnny Mulvey and his son Buck Mulvey are drinking a fresh batch of hooch when one of them accidentally leaves the gas oven on while cooking baked beans. Buck lights a cigarette, and the place explodes in a ball of fire. The hooch strangely doesn’t explode. Later, two investigators learn the hooch was made with anti-freeze and ethanol among other ingredients, and the hooch is concentrated poison. The locusts buzz down and swallow up what’s left of the substance before it can be carted way, and the locusts glow green as they swoop down and ravage local townsfolk. The town of Buckley is also affected by the hooch when they drink it. They turn into criminals and bloodthirsty fiends. Many of them resort to random violence as they foam pink spittle. A local scientist, Dr. Jake Brenner, warns Police Chief Anton Ransom of the terrible situation. Ransom happens to be an African American, and the healthy locals aren’t heeding any of the lawman’s warnings, so they try to lynch him. Shocking and tasteless, but the plot is surprising for a movie of this caliber. It’s a low-grade poke at society. But the locals get what they deserve when the locusts tear the flesh from their murderous hands. Somehow, the film manages to downplay the racist themes with a misogynist construction worker, Mark Tardy, who treats his wife, Judy Tardy, like someone who should cook and pork him at a moment’s notice. The odd trio, Police Chief Ransom, Mark and Judy Tardy, encounter the swarm of townspeople and locusts together. The film boasts themes of promoting equality, and what a setting to demonstrate it with bugs eating people’s flesh and contaminated victims of hooch ramming cars into people on the sidewalks and blasting firearms and throwing axes to kill each other. The ending is interesting and unexpected, I’ll admit. The locusts take over after Chief Ransom is devoured by cartoon locusts, and Mark and Judy fight over who gets to drive the getaway vehicle and they, too, are murdered by the swarm.
 

Andy’s buzz reached a new height, and he lit a cigarette—Virginia Slims, the kind Sandy got him hooked on, the ones she smoked after long hours of studying—on the front porch. He smoked half of it in two tokes. “They put all kinds of junk in these,” Sandy told him when they first shared a cigarette on a break during their History of American Film night class. He considered it a way of kissing her without touching her lips. “One thing that shocks me, they put cocoa in these things. It’s supposed to allow you to absorb more nicotine or something. Or it opens your lungs, I can’t remember which it is. Oh well, there are worse things I could be doing to my body, right?”
 

The woods were silent except for the noisy chirp of locusts and crickets.
 

“The locusts are coming to eat you. Duck and run for cover, they’ll tear the skin right from your bones.
Ahhhh!
”

The distant echo of a gunshot silenced him.
 

What the hell was that?

The local wildlife was silent, but after moments, the chirping started anew. He debated on watching another movie when a pair of headlights cut through the woods. The truck parked in front of the house, the brakes kicking up a wicked squeal, and then the engine was abruptly cut. When she darted out of the car, Mary-Sue came to him in frantic tears.
 

Chapter Seven

1

The power saw screeched as Richard Parker cut through another 2x4. This was the second dozen he’d cut in half. He was building a wedding altar crafted from oak. At this stage of construction, it was a platform with raised posts at each end. The roof had yet to be constructed. Beth, his daughter, was marrying Jules McCulloch in three weeks. He was the son of Garrett McCulloch, who owned the budget used car lot at the edge of Anderson Mills. Jules would inherit the family business, and that meant his daughter would be well off, and they were both genuinely in love.
 

Money and love wrapped in one package. Now that’s something to celebrate.

Amy, his wife, called him from the other room. “You want another beer, honey?”
 

She’d been sewing a silk wedding dress from scratch. The image of Amy working so hard on the dress that she was breaking out in a sweat made him realize both their lives revolved around their daughter. What would they do when she moved out and started a new life?
 

“Yeah.” He ignored the sour thought. “I’ll take another beer.”

He unplugged the power saw and popped a seat on the unfinished altar. He’d cleared out the garage and turned it into his workshop. Sawdust and sections of wood were spread out along the floor in a mess. Beth planned to have the wedding at Mount Olive Presbyterian Church eight miles from their house. Their family had attended services there since 1981, when they moved to Anderson Mills shortly after Amy became pregnant with Beth.
 

“Where’s that beer, honey?”

Amy didn’t answer.
 

“Did you hear me, Amy?”

Richard’s knees popped when he rose back to his feet. He figured she’d stepped outside. A stray orange tabby cat kept wandering into their yard, but Amy couldn’t coax it into the house. She had a thing for stray animals, especially cats. She’d take care of it for a few days, and then take it to the animal adoption clinic in Green County.
 

He entered the living room and found Amy’s legs sticking out from the kitchen. Richard hurried to check on what had happened, and when he cleared the threshold, he stood face-to- face with a strange intruder. Richard was speechless, and rendered even more so at the sight of Amy’s sewing scissors driven through her right eye and out the back of her head. He swore under his breath and cowered to the garage, horrified. Two more of the intruders lumbered after him. He looked back, turning around mid-retreat, and saw they were decayed to the point they barely resembled humans. Worms writhed from the orifices of their faces and animated the otherwise dormant features. The back door shot open again and slammed closed. Three more had entered. Their shadows eclipsed the corners of the living room before he retreated into the garage.
 

He tried to lock the door, but it was forced open before he could throw the bolt. “What in hell are you doing here?”

The six piled into the garage, and now they blocked the garage door opener hanging on the wall. Out of escape routes, he rushed to his work table and removed the hammer, clutching it, ready to use. “Stay away from me! I have the right to defend myself, and I will. Back away now!”

Fear strained his voice, and he wondered if they could tell. There was no use in pleading with a corpse—and that’s what they were, he couldn’t deny it. Peeled back lips revealed chattering teeth, their way of chewing without a working tongue. Their smell was thick with a fecund odor worse than the rotten cow carcass he once helped Eddie Stolburg clear from the road.
 

“Not another step, you hear me?”

They didn’t hear him.
 

Their slow advances continued.

No more warnings. He threw the hammer at his nearest attacker and it
thacked
against his head with a clap. The skin peeled back to reveal the skull above its eye, but the dead man didn’t break stride and neither did the other five. He reached for another weapon, but he tripped backward onto the wooden altar in his haste. The six moved above him and paused to study him, deciding what to do with him.
 

One of them carried an extension cord and plugged it into the wall’s adapter. The whir of the power saw inspired a mewl. “God no!”

The others anchored him down by his extremities. They were weak, and he almost slipped from their grips, but it was already too late. The corpse drove the spinning blade split-center into his face. Richard watched flecks of his own blood color their faces before he died.
 

The zombies didn’t eat his body. Instead, they gathered hammers and nails and other supplies and skulked back into the woods.
 

2

Walter Smalls shook free the last droplets of urine from his bladder and zipped his pants back up. He’d relieved himself on the same milky quartz slab of rock behind the mechanic’s garage for ten years. He’d worn it down in size and changed the rock’s surface from triangular obtrusions to perfectly flat. It was a bored mechanic’s pet project.