B-Movie Reels (28 page)

Garrison rushed to the bridge. “This thing is iced over. It’s at least a foot thick in ice. Impossible.”

“We can’t drive on this.” Redding stared at the bridge encapsulated in ice. They couldn’t view the entire bridge that was a quarter of a mile long; the fog was too thick. “I can’t even see five feet in front of me.”

He studied the trees; they were shrouded in the same fog. Wisps of white blinded every landmark. Anderson Mills was invisible underneath the veil. It swirled and coagulated to create thicker sheets. The covering shifted and moved, almost breathed.
 

“How do you explain this? Should we try and drive across the bridge.”

Redding spoke his mind. “I have a bad feeling about this. Nobody answers their phone, there’s silence on the CB line. And now this frozen over bridge. I don’t know what to think about it.”

“Ice cream’s definitely not melting tonight,” Garrison scoffed. He pointed at the jagged icicles columnar-like and hanging from top to the bottom like iron bars across the bridge. “We couldn’t even cross the thing if we wanted to. It’s completely blocked us out.”

Garrison wrapped his arms around it and couldn’t connect his hands when he hugged the ice column. “It’s frozen solid.”

Redding moved through the grass and tried to walk down the hill, but he kept losing his footing. Everything was clouded, the ground slippery with frost. “I can’t maneuver. I’m calling for help. Maybe we can go to sky view. One of Green County’s choppers can check it out.”

They returned to the vehicle to make the call.

An hour later, still stationed at the bridge, Redding slammed the CB radio back in place. “They say the chopper can’t fly above Anderson Mills. Low visibility—more like no visibility—makes it too dangerous to fly. They may tangle up in trees or power lines, and if they can’t see to land, they’re screwed.”

“S-so what do we do? Are we just going to wait it out?”

“Headquarters wants us to stay up here until more help shows up. They say they’ve sent other patrols into Anderson Mills, but every access is frozen over like this bridge. How do you explain it?”

“How do you explain a serial killer with a quarter-sized brain and no internal organs. This really is way out of our league—anybody’s league.”

“Then I guess we wait, huh?” Redding growled. “I hate this.”

“Maybe it’s a freak ice storm. Global warming, like I said.”

“The temperature change was so sudden, though. It was seventy-one degrees, and then it was thirty something degrees. No, this is fucked up. No one can explain this, and that’s why I want to see the other side of that bridge.”

“You can’t cross it. You said so yourself.”

“I know, I know. We’re trapped outside of Anderson Mills. Whatever the hell’s going on over there, we won’t know anything for awhile.”

Chapter Fourteen

1

The rodent’s arm bashed through a slit in the basement door, swatting for them with its nubby pink fingers. Andy stayed in front of Mary-Sue at the very back corner of the basement. The rat had them cornered, once it made its way through. The hinges snapped. The wooden 2x4 across the center of the door remained intact, but it wouldn’t hold for long.

The door was turned into kindling bit by bit. The rat punched and leveled its weight into the door with unrelenting power. Andy heard the door break in two, and the rat clawed the pieces behind him, clearing the way. The rat’s drooling maw snapped the center board in half and destroyed the door frame by its enlarged sides impacting against them. Wood crumbled in plaster-sized debris in its wake, and that fast, the rat was on the stairs. The shadows parted to reveal the monster’s teeth, each one slathered and wet by the slab of a tongue wider than a textbook. Saliva pattered the staircase. It whipped back and forth and forced its body through the door.

“
It’s coming!
” Mary-Sue screamed. “Do something, Andy. For God’s sake, do something!”

“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
 

She scanned the basement for an answer. “Throw something at it.”

He picked up a laundry hamper and heaved it at the rat. It swiped it out of its way and hissed.

She scoffed at his weapon choice and discovered a baseball bat and heaved it next. The rat clamped down on the wood and broke it in half.
 

The rat was poised to lunge down the steps at them. Its two front legs were up in the air, the fingers bent as gnarled weapons. The hind legs rippled with muscle underneath the sandy-colored fur and layers of extra skin.
 

He forced Mary-Sue to stay behind him. He wasn’t sure what next to do, so he picked up a fire extinguisher and raised it. “Maybe this will scare it off?”

“Do it! Now, before it gets down those stairs.”

He extended the nozzle end toward the enemy, but before he could do anything else, the entire staircase collapsed. The rat was heaved forward, the round body spinning upside down and careening onto the concrete floor head-first in a spinning mess.
 

Crick!

He winced after the bone’s snap. The rat’s mouth was a slit, trails of blood glomming down from both sides of it. Its eyes were silver buckshot, cold and distant. The body didn’t move. The white belly and legs were locked in the air as if caught in a mouse trap.
 

Just like in
Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana,
Andy thought.
The resemblance of the rat from the movie was uncanny. He couldn’t let it go as coincidence.
 

Mary-Sue popped out from behind him and drove a twenty pound free weight into the rat’s skull. It gave under the weight, and the buckshot circles were spat out followed by globules of blood by the pint. She then cowered behind him at the mess. “I fucking hate those things! Disgusting even when they’re dead.”

He stared at the smashed-in skull. There weren’t broken fragments, just brittle pieces and no brain matter beneath. And then a noxious odor gurgled from the rat’s bowels and scented the air. It wasn’t the stink of feces, but cow carcasses. The smell was confirmed when the stomach deflated and the sack-for-a belly split open. Strands of red stained white and black spotted fur and digested innards stained the floor.
 

“
Fucking Christ!
” She pinched her nose. “What the hell is this thing?”

“Let’s step out,” he suggested, taking her by the arm. “We don’t need to keep looking at this.”

The staircase was in ruins, but it was intact enough to tread one careful step at a time. Soon, they reached the top. As they came upstairs, he had to catch Mary-Sue in his arms when she slipped on the turpentine in the hallway. Moving on, he tried the phone in the kitchen, but it was dead—as he already knew, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity to check again. Mary-Sue rummaged through the drawers and selected a twelve inch carving knife.

“That thing’s huge. You carve turkeys with that thing or what?”

“Pumpkins.” She gave him a crooked smile. “Only pumpkins.”

He followed her lead, stealing a meat tenderizer. The idea of going up against something like a rat or locusts with a knife or meat tenderizer was ridiculous, and he knew it. “What are we doing, really?”

“It makes me feel better, okay?” She peered out of the window above the sink at the acres of dead cattle. “That thing stinking up the basement has killed everything. So much for the dairy farm and so much for my dad.”

He couldn’t deny the obvious. Jimmy Jennings had to be dead. He’d been missing long enough, and the bodies they discovered ravaged in the woods was another reason to believe the unexplained. “I can’t lie to you, Mary-Sue, but I can say we’re escaping this mess and getting a straight answer as to why that thing in the basement can exist. Let’s drive the hell out of here, okay? I left my cell phone at my house. I can call for help there. It’s worth a try.”

Her face was drained of color, the disgusted tears standard to the grieving package. She planted both hands on the sink, knelt over and threw up with a painful retch. She turned on the sink and flicked on the garbage disposal. She washed out her mouth and shook her head.
 

“None of this adds up, Andy. Why are we even alive? We’re very lucky that rat stumbled down the stairs and broke its neck. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if it didn’t? I don’t want to die like that, not tortured, or, or devoured.”

Andy forced out the next words. “It’s out of our hands what’s going on. A logical explanation is too much to ask right now. We can guess all night or we can try and call for help. I’m sorry your father’s gone. He’d want you to be safe no matter how you two got along. Nobody can say where that rat came from or why the locusts attacked us. We’ll worry about it when we’re somewhere safe. Somebody has a shit-load of explaining to do, but for now, let’s get the hell out of here.”

She washed out her mouth again and wiped her face dry with a hand towel. “Okay.” She picked up the knife. “But I’m not going anywhere without a weapon.”

He lifted up the meat tenderizer. “You got it.”

They walked outside and checked each direction. He turned to Mary’s truck. The windows were smashed, the hood over the engine removed and the engine block was serrated by teeth-shaped markings.
 

“The vermin destroyed the truck. Why would it do that?”

He was shocked himself. “I, well, I don’t know.”

“What do we do now?”

He studied the surrounding woods. So far, it appeared to be unoccupied. They wouldn’t get anywhere staying at her house, and now that they didn’t have transportation, they had no choice but to walk to his house and make the call from his cell phone. It was the logical choice, but also the dangerous one.
 

“I guess we walk to the house.”

She grimaced at the suggestion. “I hope nothing else is out there.”

“Me too.”
 

2

The walking corpses were on alert at the Ryerson house. Four manned the windows and the fifth one was stationed across from the blank screen. The decayed fingers scanned the reels to make the next choice after
The Hospice Massacre
ended. Stacks of reels were shoved aside, sorted through with haste, for the corpse wanted something more devious and devastating. The town would die, and after that, the surrounding cities and towns would follow. The spirits of the dead demanded a movie torturous and sadistic beyond reason.
 

Titles identified by magic marker passed by with wavering enthusiasm:
The Incredible Exploding Man
,
Revenge of the Basement Trolls, The Cannibal Brain, Nightmares of the Sandman, Copperhead Terror, The Laundry Mat Strangler,
and then the bone and gristle hands clutched onto
Escape of the Psychopaths.
 

The corpse set the first reel and began the film.

Warden John Keely guided author Brett Waters through the padded cells at Longview Hills Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane. The doors were steel reinforced with a removable wooden slot to peep inside. Brett felt relatively safe being in the maximum security wing of the sanitarium.
 

“I’m researching this place for a novel,” Brett explained to the warden who stared straight ahead indifferent to who he was delivering across the wing. “I want to really capture how it feels to be locked up and left in here, practically barricaded without any contact with the outside world.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of you,” Warden Keely said. “I saw you on a talk show or somethin’. Best-selling author, right?—forgive me, I don’t read anything except newspapers and requisition forms. Dr. Kiernan is a fan of yours. You write the mysteries involving cold cases, I remember. Yeah, the doc eats that stuff up. He’s been talking up your visit for days.”

“Great.” Brett was enthusiastic by the prospect. “Most people don’t want to talk to people like me. They think I’ll put their lives in print and embarrass them. So who’re behind those cells? Do you know much about them?”

“Just the juicy details, and I’m sure that’s what you’re after. I can’t say much about their childhoods or where they lived or what their favorite TV show was, except for Wayne Saunders. He loves The Andy Griffith Show and that Don Knotts guy.”

“Then start with Wayne. What did he do to land himself in here?”

Warden Keely adjusted his black-rimmed glasses and said, “Wayne’s simply insane. He lost his mind after he caught his wife sleeping with another man. They used to live in L.A. He strangled them both with the man’s prick still inside her. Then Wayne quit putting his time in at work and spent every waking moment for seven days straight whittling down on their bodies with a beveling tool. Thousands of specks of human tissue, organs, and bone were slopped on the basement floor. Neighbors began to complain of a stink and called the police, and the rest is history.”

“I’m sure there’s more to it than that for Mr. Saunders’ breakdown. A man doesn’t just snap like that, especially someone in such a high paying career. He lived in a two-story house, and in L.A., that’s pretty good. His wife was a background extra for a movie company. I’m sure the affairs she had weren’t the beginning of his mental deterioration, it was a long build-up of extramarital affairs. Just like the affairs probably whittled at Mr. Saunders, he whittled on his dead wife’s body.”