B-Movie Reels (30 page)

Gwinn asked, “Are you cold?”

Redding exhaled another cloud of menthol cigarette smoke. “How did you guess?”

Garrison, Redding’s partner, returned from the edge of the bridge. Three of them had tried to scout the hill, but again they failed to take more than five steps down without losing their foothold. “It’s too slick to navigate. Fog’s still thick too.”

“Overtime will be nice tonight,” Gwinn boasted. “Lord knows I need it. It’s my wife’s birthday in two weeks.”

“I’d rather be home stickin’ my wife than gettin’ overtime,” Redding complained. “I’m freezing my nuts off out here. I heard extreme cold and extreme heat is bad for a man’s sperm count.”

“Jesus Christ, pipe down,” Garrison bickered. “What’s the last we heard about that chopper? Did you catch anything new while we got lost down there? We thought we heard a scream. It was from far away, though. It could’ve been anything.”

Redding shivered as he worked to light another cigarette. “They’re still waiting it out. We’ve confirmed that the power’s out in parts of Anderson Mills, and the phones are dead. Nobody’s home.”

The patter and drip silenced him.
 

“Do you see that?”

Garrison finally noticed the change at the bridge. “Why’s it doing that?”

The column icicles melted at a fervent speed, the patter changing into thickening forks of water. The bridge seemed to come alive, breaking the ice sheath over it in crunches and splashes, and then in a bizarre split-second surge, the flow accelerated into a great tidal wave. It shot across the road and knocked them backward. Many were flipped onto their backs and dragged for yards by the liquid freight train.
 

“
Graaaah!
” Garrison spat, shocked by the ice-cold water. He was thrown back so fast, he did a forced summersault. Redding collapsed onto his side, scuffed the left side of his face against the road and felt blood run down his neck. Despite being disoriented, Redding worked up to his knees and stood. Many of the officers coughed and sputtered, strewn like beached fish.
 

“Come on! Get up! Move it! Move it!” Redding shouted at everybody. “Drive across the bridge. It’s safe to cross.
It melted!
”

Garrison joined him, shaking off like a dog. “Fucking shit, it’s cold. The heater better work in that piece of shit of yours or I swear I’ll quit this gig. How the hell did that fucking happen?”

“I can’t say. It’s about the same with everything else that’s been happening lately.”

Redding sprinted to the car, started it up, and waited for the other patrol cars to follow him across the bridge into Anderson Mills.
 

2

The uphill trek wore on them. At first, their pace was rigorous and determined, and now Andy struggled to place one foot before the other. He didn’t realize how steep the incline was on the way to the house, damn near a fifty degree angle in parts, he thought. The dense trees cast wicked shadows over the dirt road, creating many hiding places for bad things that could or could not be another rat or swarm of locusts bent on attacking them. It wasn’t silent. The background noise was a din of continuous dripping as the trees melted and the frost turned to water. The air was a summer evening’s temperature once again.

“Tell me what we’re going to do when this is over?” Mary-Sue asked, exasperated and hunched forward. “Something pleasant, please.”

He combed his mind for ideas, deciding to keep it simple. “A chocolate sundae sounds good, or maybe onion rings.”

“There’s a Dairy Barn outside of Anderson Mills. They have the best ice cream sundaes and milk shakes. They don’t have onion rings, but they have burgers and fries. Their bacon melt is the best.” She kissed her two fingers to her lips. “
Mmmm-uah!
It’s perfection. If we go the Dairy Barn, I’ll buy.”

“Sounds like a plan, but you know what I’m more worried about is what the hell I’ll do for a job after this. I’m not sure I can watch another one of those horror movies again—at least not for a while. Professor Maxwell can find himself a new student to watch those pieces of crap. I’m signing off.”

She narrowed her eyes, skeptical. “So the things that attacked us tonight, did they really remind you of the movies you’ve been watching? You’re still convinced.”

He feared if he discussed it again, she’d argue the insanity of the idea, but she brought it up this time, so he carefully explained. “It could mean nothing, but on a night like this, coincidences happen for a reason. The rat was a carbon copy of the movie, I swear to you. And isn’t it odd the rat deflated after it broke its neck? It didn’t have a full set of organs either. You smashed its skull, but there wasn’t any brain matter and the skull itself wasn’t much of a skull—more like a thin shell. And the locusts were from a movie too. In the movie, they terrorized a town and ate the flesh from their victims. The people in the movie died just like those victims we found in the woods. Exactly the same.”

Mary-Sue shook her head. “Ever since your uncle was accused of those murders, Anderson Mills hasn’t been the same. How did your uncle make all those people die like that? I mean, how did he connect other people’s body parts to one another?”

The way she blatantly assumed his uncle was guilty had him fuming, the heat brewing in his skull channeling into his words. “Nobody really proved he did those things. Use your head. How is that logically possible?”

“Okay then, how are flesh-eating locusts and killer rats the size of a semi truck logically possible?” She whipped around and seized him by the shoulders. “I’m sorry to say it, but the two incidents involve equally unbelievable things, and the dead bodies left behind don’t lie. It happened, Andy. Your uncle was involved. Sure, it’s insane to picture him hacking limbs from one body and somehow grafting them to another—”

“Actually, it’s not insane,” a snicker interrupted their argument. “It’s very real, and very possible. Pleasurable, too, if you let it be.”

Andy clutched onto the meat tenderizer, challenging the person in hiding. “Who said that?”

He waited for an answer. A form materialized from the woods instead. The person was five foot tall, his back badly hunched, and his hair was wild like Albert Einstein’s. His wicked smile off-set his otherwise calm face. What sparked Andy’s concern was the man’s wardrobe: a straight jacket with the sleeves cut out. He was also dragging something in a canvas bag behind him.

“It’s not that hard to graft body parts from one body to another,” he said. “You make sure the amputation is clean, and then you stitch it back together.
See!
”

He dumped the bag out and a lump the size of a dog tumbled loose. The shape was a torso missing every limb including the neck. Each amputated limb was replaced by a different head.
 

“I can’t take anymore of this shit!” Andy shouted, waving the meat tenderizer as a threat. “You stay away from us. I’m serious. I’ll hurt you.”

“I guess you are serious,” the man tittered, tilting his head back and giving them both a wormy smile. Next, the man lifted out a steel bit from a drill press. It was connected to a loop at the back of his straight-jacket. “Innovation is a serial killer’s bread and butter. But both our weapons require close contact. Step right up, boy. I’ll teach you a thing or two. Go ahead,” he said, grinning. “Hurt me.”

Mary-Sue restrained Andy, so he pressed the stranger for answers. “Hey, wait a second. Who are you?”

The man tossed the drill bit from one hand to the other, prepared to duel. “I’m Hank Radley, ever heard of me?”

“No.” Andy was confused by the man’s answer. “Where are you from?”

“I’ve been locked up in eight sanitariums.” He shook his head slowly from side-to-side. Spittle foamed at both sides of his mouth and his nose was wet with running snot. “I can’t stop putting myself to work. Medication doesn’t work on me because I’m not insane—I just like what I do!
I like to build people, and you two are a good combination. Girlie, you have nice legs, but they’d look so much better on your friend. I’m not sure which one has better facial features yet. And you, boy, you need tits. She has such big ones—bags of milky glee!—and they’ll break your back, but who cares?
You’ll be dead by then!
”

Andy’s pulse raced in rhythm to his thoughts, building and building. The man was dressed in a straight-jacket, but there wasn’t a sanitarium for hundreds of miles. And why would he be hiding in Black Hill Woods waiting to ambush them?
 

“This man isn’t real,” he reasoned aloud. “He’s just like that rat. I’m sure he’s not intact from the inside out. He’s not solid.”

“I’m very real.” The man approached Andy as if to prove his statement. “Look at me. Touch me if you dare.”

Another form leaped from a tree limb and touched down. This person, too, was in a straight-jacket with the sleeves torn out. A chainsaw was wrapped around his back by a rope. The objects that dangled from his waist drew Mary-Sue to cling onto him. The knife went limp in her grasp. A string of severed heads bobbed on a chain laced with cow hooks. Two of the heads he recognized as Larry and Sue Rogers from the grocery store. He couldn’t help but suspect they had been the last two alive in Anderson Mills.
 

“Who the fuck are you?” Andy spat at them. “Where did you come from?”

“My name is Graham Williams.” The long black hair and beard lent him a Charles Manson likeness. He wasn’t lanky as Manson, but instead over three hundred pounds—and how a man of that build climbed the tree was beyond Andy. Graham lifted up Larry Roger’s head and stuck his tongue inside the dead man’s mouth. The lips were permanently forced open by nails driven between the jaw and mandible. “Every mouth is capable of the same pleasures, man or woman, dead or alive…”

“You get a lot of head, Graham?” Hank Radley prattled to his cohort. “Which one do you want, the boy or the girl? I’ll let you take the heads if you let me have the rest.”

Mary-Sue recoiled, and in her disgust, she launched the knife at Graham. It stuck into Graham’s left eye and forced him up against a tree. Impulse led Andy to drive his meat tenderizer into the knife’s handle and strike it until the blade gouged through Graham’s head and deep into the tree. The insides of his skull were soft, and it didn’t take much effort for him to slip his head forward and escape the cranial anchor. The move cost the entire left side of his face, which broke off in one solid clay-like piece.
 

Andy seized the chainsaw from Graham’s back and jerked back on the cord to start it up. Spitting gasoline fumes, he rammed the device into Graham’s midsection, sliced through the stomach and ended at the neck. The man’s upper body landed in two halves, each side spurting and coughing gobs of crimson.

Hank Radley attacked Mary-Sue, trying to throw his arms around her, but she ducked and took off sprinting. The madman chased her up the dirt road, calling after her, “
I just want to make
you more beautiful. SO LET ME CUT THOSE TITS OFF!”

Andy double checked Graham’s body, the two halves deflating into a husk of dyed red skin and a froth of dissolving bones. The deterioration reminded him of cigarette burns on film strips.
 

He raced on to save Mary-Sue, but once he was halfway up the hill, gas spilled from the chainsaw’s tank and the saw dismantled itself in his hands with clunks and gears breaking. When it struck the ground, it vanished in a poof of heavy smoke.
 

Shit!

He reclaimed the meat tenderizer from his pocket and once he’d caught up to him he brought it down onto the back of Hank Radley’s skull. It sank inward with an enormous cough of blood—as if his skull was a bowl of crimson filled to the brim—and Hank stumbled, taking in the damage, and fell over himself. He landed on his drill bit, and it stabbed through his throat with the pop of trachea. He reached out with both hands for Andy, but Andy easily kicked him away.
 

“You’re not real. How you exist, I don’t know, but you won’t be here much longer. You’ll dissolve into nothing. You’ll be gone!”

He balanced the meat tenderizer in his hand, waiting the need to use it again. He studied Hank’s eyes. The man was still pleased with himself, the staple-like indentions of a smile wider than before. “You can’t stop us, Andy. You’ll never make it to the house.”

“What?” Andy reeled at the comment. “You don’t know me. How do you know my name? And what do you know about the house?”

“You shouldn’t stand in our way,” Hank threatened as orange bubbles erupted from his lips. “There are more of us coming your way. The dead want into your world, so let us in!”

“Shut up!” Mary-Sue came at him clutching a limestone rock the size of a cinder block and dropped it onto the man’s face.
 

Hank convulsed and his body sank into itself, boiling and melting into a waxy pile of fluids.

“I don’t want to see the damage,” she pled through gritted teeth, absolutely disgusted by the mess. “Let’s hurry to the house. I can’t take much more of this shit.”

Andy narrowed his eyes into the distance and spotted new enemies scattered about the woods, and like the two men, they also wore straight jackets. “There’s no sanitarium nearby, is there?”

“Not anywhere for hundreds of miles. Where are they coming from?”

He snatched her arm, urging her on. “No time to figure it out. Let’s keeping going. It’s getting too dangerous to be on foot, or in the woods at all.”